Adding Harwell-Boeing support in PETSc?

[Richard Tran Mills]

Hi Folks,

It seems that someone always wants me to either give them a matrix in 
Harwell-Boeing format, or to try experimenting with a matrix that they give me 
in Harwell-Boeing format.  I would prefer that the format just go away, but 
since this doesn't seem to be happening, I would like to have some PETSc 
support mechanisms for reading and writing the beasts.  I'd like to have 
something like a PETSC_VIEWER_HB for writing them out, and I'd like to have 
MatLoad() be able to use the viewer to load the matrices as well.

I thought I might look into adding something like this, but before I waste 
time with it, I thought I would ask to folks if either a) they think it is a 
bad idea or b) someone has already got the code for this.

Cheers,
Richard