[petsc-dev] Known outdated sections of the User's Manual?

[Matthew Knepley]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 7:01 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> That makes sense - is " the modern way" to get the data into an
> environment with robust visualization, as fast as possible? For small
> things, personally I am a fan of dumping PETSc binaries and opening
> them in MATLAB (doesn't require any special configuration on the
> library anymore, as far as I can tell), and I think that also works
> with python. That also works well dumping to VTK. This is a topic
> which might be very welcome for beginners in the tutorials, as there
> is often an expectation of being able to scope things.


I guess by modern I meant:

  a) Use ViewFromOptions() and the ::: format for options so that you can
easily output in any format

  b) Use Lisandro's new support for movies, and better support for drawing
(there is even a Plex draw now)

  c) For stuff with DM structure, use binary VTK (like vtu or vts) or
HDF5/XDMF

Lisandro would know better than I do.

  Thanks,

     Matt


> On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 3:45 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 1:58 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm working on some groundwork to improve the PETSc documentation, and
> >> the next thing I'd like to look at is the User's Manual, adding
> >> slightly-prettier code listings (as in the update to the dev manual).
> >>
> >> Before doing that, however,  it would be very helpful to know if there
> >> are any sections of the manual which are known, by the relevant
> >> experts here, to require deletion or heavy rewrites; it would of
> >> course be a waste of time to format these.
> >>
> >> Specifically, I'm wondering about the following sections, which have
> >> in common that they are things concerned with friendly external tools.
> >> I've seen new users get very frustrated when they expect these sorts
> >> of things to "just work," so it's probably constructive to remove any
> >> outdated information here:
> >>
> >> - Chapter 11: Using MATLAB with PETSc . The support here has changed
> >> quite a lot, so I'm not sure what currently works. Is the MATLAB
> >> Compute Engine still supported?
> >>
> >> - Sections 15.10-15.14: Eclipse/Qt Creator/Developers Studio/XCode
> >> users. This is likely not all current. Is this information helpful
> >> here?
> >>
> >> - Section 15.15 : Graphics. I saw that there were some updates to the
> >> drawing tools recently by Lisandro, so if any of this material is
> >> known to be out of date, that would be helpful to know.
> >
> >
> > I think graphics is not so much out of date now as incomplete. We really
> > want
> > to be telling people to do things the modern way, but the old ways still
> > work.
> >
> >    Matt
> >
> > --
> > What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
> experiments
> > is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
> experiments
> > lead.
> > -- Norbert Wiener
>



-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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