tracking petsc

[Satish Balay]

On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Matthew Knepley wrote:

> Simon Burton <simon at arrowtheory.com> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:49:46 -0600
> > Matthew Knepley <knepley at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> >
> >> 
> >> Simon Burton <simon at arrowtheory.com> writes:
> >> 
> >>       This was patched in 2.3.0, but maybe you have an unpatched version. It is
> >> easy to check. The symbol comes from 
> >
> > We have been tracking your bitkeeper repository. I don't know if this is
> > sane or not because we want to release something (in a few weeks)
> > and that basically means it is up to us to somehow stabilize PETSc,
> > or at least "bless" some particular version of PETSc.
> >
> > No, that doesn't sound right either: fixes that you guys make will go into
> > the bk repository, so... I guess what I am asking is, are we just insane to
> > try and do this ? Or, is it possible to maybe branch your repository so
> > we can stabilize PETSc for some kind of beta release ?
> 
>   This is our preference. Why? It is jsut as stable as tarballs because you can
> clone to any particular revision, BUT its more flexible because you can easily
> pull any fixes or upgrades.

Unless we are moving away from making any more releases - we should
make a release for this..

It would be a bit difficult to manage patches for 2 relases but this
might be better than folks having different dev-snapshots [and we
trying to keep track of these bugreports]..


> 
> > Sounds like we just need to make it clear that petsc is on the move
> > and that you guys are completely responsive to bug reports, etc.
> >
> > We are going to build a "petsc doesn't work" FAQ, but, gee i wish your email
> > list (petsc-maint) was archived somewhere...
> 
>   The DOE really frowns on this I believe. We discuss a lot of DOE internal stuff
> on it. However, it there were an archived list to Cc, we could talk about doing that.

We can have publically archived mailing lists for eg:
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/mpich-discuss/threads.html

But currently petsc-dev list archives are available only locally. And
petsc-maint is a 'bug-tracker' - not a mailing list. The archives of
this are also available locally only.

I'm checking if we can upgrade to a better bug tracker - with both
public/private entries [like bugzilla]. But....

Satish

> 
> > If you start getting 10 more support queires a day can you handle that ?
> > What about 50 ? Maybe I can also act as a gateway, if I tell our users to come to
> > me first.
> 
>   Well, we get anywhere from 50-200 per day, so I think we can probably handle some more. In
> my experience there are a lot up front with a new community,but it rapidly tails off.
> 
>    Matt
>