[petsc-dev] DESTDIR

[Jed Brown]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:44:07 -0500 (CDT), Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Apr 2010, Sean Farley wrote:
> 
> > >
> > > I guess DESTDIR is useful for packaging PETSc? [perhaps rpm or
> > > equivalent?] Is that what you are trying to do?
> > 
> > 
> > Yes, this is a pet project of mine for os x and, potentially, rpms or
> > something similar, though I haven't looked into other packaging systems.
> 
> Ok - I'll look at it. Perhaps its a simple change.

Distros heavily discourage RPATH installs.  This makes sense when
installing to /usr or /usr/local (which they usually mandate), but not
at all when installing to a non-standard path.  Supporting both RPATH
and non-RPATH installs adds some build system complication.

This relates to something that has been on my mind for a while: in the
interest of making PETSc more accessible from external packages that do
not want to use PETSc's makefiles, I suggest having a petsc-config that
offers compilation and linking flags, including shared libs (no
recursive dependencies), static libs, and RPATH/non-RPATH linking.  I
would use pkgconfig for this except that pkgconfig is bad at handling
multiple installs, so a stand-alone petsc-config written in Python seems
like the natural candidate.

Jed