This is a project we have been working on for a while now behind the scenes and are more than happy to see it finally become reality. Part of the support from the STF are threefull time developer positions to work on LFortran, fpm and the fpm registry!
We will announce the positions as soon as possible via the Jobs category.
Many thanks to the STF for considering Fortran as an important component of the open source ecosystem and everyone who helped to make this project possible.
I’m really happy to see Fortran included in the pilot funding round. I wonder what could be a long-term litmus test for the success of the project? Would it be the future adoption of fpm in ICON or other similar weather/climate models?
The big goal for now is to establish our registry to make existing fpm projects easier to discover and provide a motivation for Fortran projects to transition to fpm. A few workpackages in the fpm registry track target outstanding issues with make adopting fpm in some existing codebases unnecessary difficult.
Whether ICON, WRF, etc. will actually transition to fpm is another question, changing a build system is always a lot of engineering effort for a project. We have to provide some really good arguments with fpm to make it worth their time, and I think we are on the right track.
Sometimes one has to do the heavier lifting to setup the “new” thingy for others since they are too “busy” to do it themselves, it is not quite fair yes, but that’s how it is. With WRF Fortran being an open-source project, wonder if this STF project can simply include an action item to deliver an fpm project as a starting point to WRF folks, if not present already? That might facilitate the transition.
Yes that is an option, but must be done carefully, we don’t want to come across as forcing fpm on other projects. Also, if we break something in the process it might just be blamed on fpm.
For the reason mentioned above I don’t believe this is a good idea, it should always be done in collaboration with the respective project. Let’s move fpm forward first and observe how it gets adopted in the ecosystem, once bigger projects start moving, we can support them.
Ondrej and I will offer an open round tomorrow, anyone interested in working on the project is invited to join. Please contact us if the time is unsuitable for your timezone, we will figure something out (Ondrej is in MST / UTC-7:00 and I’m in CET / UTC+1:00).
Topic: STF project
Time: Nov 11, 2022 06:30 PM Universal Time UTC
Application period for the three projects is open until Friday 18th Nov 2022. There is a patch requirement like for the Google Summer of Code, please send a reference to your previous contributions to a Fortran-lang projects (fpm, LFortran, stdlib, webpage, …) with your application. Thanks a lot to everyone who already send in their application!
Applications without having send a patch will not be considered.
