[petsc-dev] Show download URL

[Blaise A Bourdin]

Hi,

I recently came across an issue with a segfault in ddot. It turns out that the problem was not at all in petsc, but rather that the machine I was compiling PETSc from had no direct access to the internet (quite common in industry HPC clusters), and that the admin was downloading chaco from sandia directly instead of the patched tarball hosted on petsc servers. (I could also elaborate on the sanity of redefining ddot in a LIBRARY...)

This brings my first request: the chaco tarball on MCS and sandia have the same name. Would it make sense to clearly indicate when a packaged hosted by petsc is different from the upstream package? It would have made it clear from the beginning that the admin was not using the PETSc patched tarball.

Secondly: right now, short of knowing that the url are in the python config files in $PETSC_DIR/config/PETSc/packages (or config/BuildSYstem/config/packages, for some reason), the workflow to download packages on a machine with no direct internet access is to configure with --download-coolpackage, wait a long time for configure to run, wait until download fails, and a message
Unable to download package Chaco from: http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/externalpackages/coolpackage.tar.gz
to pop up

Would it be possible to 
1. print the download url _before_ trying to download a package
2. add a configure options that would print the url of all packages for which a download has been requested?

Not understanding the logic of BuildSystem, I don’t know if 2. is even possible, but it sure would be nice...


Regards,

Blaise

-- 
Department of Mathematics and Center for Computation & Technology
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
Tel. +1 (225) 578 1612, Fax  +1 (225) 578 4276 http://www.math.lsu.edu/~bourdin