[petsc-dev] moab nightlybuild failure

[Satish Balay]

On Fri, 28 Jun 2013, Satish Balay wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Jun 2013, Jed Brown wrote:
> 
> > Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
> > 
> > >    Not at all!  It is EXACTLY the workflow we expect to see as PETSc
> > >    and MOAB become best buds. Someone branches off of PETSc master and
> > >    moab master and make related changes to __both__ of those branches
> > >    over time (likely a small team of people is working on these
> > >    branches or branches of these branches). For example making another
> > >    PETSc hook into moab that requires some additions to the moab base
> > >    code as well as additional PETSc code*. When they are all done the
> > >    two branches are eventually (and at the same time) merged into
> > >    PETSc master and moab master for everyone to benefit from.
> > 
> > I think that if we ever have "PETSc example as a test suite
> > for a new feature in MOAB", it will be temporary and not necessary to
> > automate.
> > 
> > >    Now I originally proposed doing this by simply requiring these
> > >    people (who are presumably somewhat competent) to simply manually
> > >    make sure the branches in the two packages match up appropriately
> > >    (with perhaps a naming convention) as they do other stuff and
> > >    checkout other branches then go back to work on their combined
> > >    PETSc moab project they manually make sure the appropriate branch
> > >    is set for each package.
> > 
> > I think this is reasonable, and I think the PETSc branch should not
> > merge to 'master' until the corresponding branch in MOAB has merged to
> > master, so that we can point moab.py's gitcommit at it.
> > 
> > >   Jed implied that the manual matches of branches I proposed could be
> > >   handled somewhat automatically (mumbling about gitcommit; I didn't
> > >   understand what you proposed). My response is that __IF__ it can be
> > >   handled somewhat automatically then it should be handled properly
> > >   automatically; hence I asked if it could be handled completely
> > >   generally automatically (checking out matching partners
> > >   automatically) and your response was it is nebulous, complicated and
> > >   unnecessary. 
> > 
> > I think automating it is too hard, not because of the data model or
> > interface, but because making the decision about what is correct
> > behavior is so subjective and involves non-local information.
> 
> Also what exactly are we automating?
> 
> moab.py is for users automatic install of pacakges. And it should work for 'maint', 'master' branches.

Caveat: if a user checkouts an old commit in maint/master branch - it
shold work with moab [currently this does not work in master branch
with it tracking 'moab-master']

Satish

> 
> If a person [or group] are developing moab+petsc in sync in a
> moab/petsc branchs - they can do that without touching moab.py [as we
> did with petsc+buildsystem?]
> 
> Or is that we require the development branch to be fully supported -
> and --download-moab=1 should work work without issues? [and require
> proper infrastructure in package.py and moab.py?
> 
> Satish
>