Should BuildSystem download updated external packages when they are out of date?

[Satish Balay]

I think some packages don't match tarball names with the dir-name. So
one stratergy is to stash the tarball name somewhere [inside the
extracted dir]

And then - use this info to check for a match - the next time
configure is run..

We do make some updates of tarballs without changing the tarball
names. These updates wouldn't be caught though..

Satish

On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Barry Smith wrote:

> 
>   This is easy enough if we have a way of knowing the package is "out of
> date". We could do it based on if the directory name matches the base part of
> the tarball file name that is being downloaded. This would work if the
> directory name is always the same as the base part of the tarball file name.
> Is this true?
> 
>   Then simply write a short message to the screen saying deleting old version,
> python unlink it and proceed as normal.
> 
> 
>   Barry
> 
> On Oct 2, 2009, at 9:11 AM, Richard Tran Mills wrote:
> 
> > BuildSystem Folks (Matt, mainly),
> > 
> > This is not really a problem for me since I know about this behavior
> > already, but I note that it can cause significant confusion when
> > configure.py has been asked to download a package and a very out of date
> > version of that package already exists in $PETSC_DIR/externalpackages.  In
> > this case, configure.py doesn't do anything since the package is already
> > there, but in some cases the interfaces have changed and that package isn't
> > actually usable.  For instance, if hypre-2.0.0 is present, it won't work
> > with the current petsc-dev, but the configure proceeds anyway, even though
> > things won't work unless hypre-2.4.0b is downloaded.  In such a case,
> > deleting the hypre-2.0.0 directory and re-running configure.py will fix the
> > problem, but it seems like this isn't very user-friendly and I know that it
> > does cause some confusion.
> > 
> > I am no BuildSystem hacker (I think I've committed a change maybed once, in
> > 2005?).  Can someone tell me if it is reasonable to make configure.py
> > download the new package if the old one is too out of date?
> > 
> > Sincerely,
> > Richard
>