NetBSD port

[Jed Brown]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:33:21 +1300, Kevin.Buckley at ecs.vuw.ac.nz wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> we have a researcher here at VUW who wishes to make use of
> our NetBSD grid of machines, using OpenMPI under Sun Grid
> Engine for running the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM) code
> which has PETSc as a dependency.

Neat, it's nice to hear about more PISM users.

> I have found a port of PETSc for FreeBSD but, as I have come
> to realise since moving to a NetBSD house, there are "subtle"
> differences in the various build systems.

That port has not been updated to 3.0.0, the build system is slightly
different from 2.3.3.

> I thus thought I'd ask folk out there in the PETSc devel
> community, if they have had any experience with the package
> under the NetBSD pkgsrc system.

I have used PETSc under FreeBSD, though I always built a private copy
instead of the one from "ports".  I'm not familiar with the differences
relative to pkgsrc.

> For what it's worth, I have recently compiled and tested PETSc
> on a NetBSD platform, albeit outside of the NetBSD pkgsrc system.

We usually recommend this because it is valuable to have at least two
configurations available (a debugging build activates lots of input
validation and other checks to help users find bugs in their code).  End
users (those who are not writing code) can probably get away with just
an optimized build.  Also note that PETSc has many optional dependencies
(like third-party preconditioners) that can add a lot of value, but are
almost never selected when packaged by distributions.

In any case, we may be able to help if you explain what you would like
PETSc's build system to produce.

Jed