[petsc-dev] PetscOptions defaults after PetscInitialize

[Jed Brown]

"Smith, Barry F." <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>   Yuck, I think a far better user API is that PetscOptionsInsertFile() be callable before PetscInitialize(). The problem is that people have shoveled so much post-PetscInitialize() code into  PetscOptionsInsertFile() over the years that stripping it all out would be painful. Maybe get a simplier pre- 2005 version of the routine and strip out the post-PetscInitialize() material?

You want every rank to open the file independently?  Or
PetscOptionsInsertFile somehow caches the file contents without using
PetscMalloc and broadcasts it after reaching PetscInitialize?  That
seems a bit crazy.

>    Barry
>
>
>> On Apr 22, 2018, at 5:54 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>> 
>> For users that read their own configuration files and/or choose
>> PetscOptionsInsertFile after PetscInitialize, we don't have a good way
>> to avoid overwriting PETSC_OPTIONS or command-line options.  The user
>> could manually find argv and the environment variable, but that's a poor
>> abstraction.  Should PetscOptionsInsertFile learn how to behave so as to
>> add new entries to the options database, but not supersede any that
>> already exist?