[petsc-dev] easyinstall for petsc4py

[Lisandro Dalcin]

On 4 August 2010 12:44, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>  Lisandro,
>
>    We would like to help you make it possible for petsc4py to be installed by easyinstall and automatically install PETSc with it, thus making it trivial for Python users to start using petsc4py. How can we help make this happen?
>

$ export PETSC_DIR=/path/to/petsc
$ export PETSC_ARCH=arch-name
$ easy_install petsc4py

This should work and be enough (at least on Linux)...

Disclaimer: I've not actually tested this in a long time. If it does
not work, it should easy to fix. Right not I do not remember the
logics to make things work with prefix and non-prefix PETSc installs,
but I remember handling these two cases.


>    I image the petsc4py install would look for mpi4py, if it finds it then figure out the MPI used to build it and pass that MPi information on to PETSc's configure.

Perhaps this will surprise you: petsc4py does not depend in any way on
mpi4py. Still, you can still pass an mpi4py.MPI.Comm instance, and
petsc4py will accept it and do the right thing...

> If it does not find mpi4py then it would tell PETSc configure to not use MPI. If this doesn't make sense, I just made it up so I can understand it might not make sense, tell us how it should work.
>

petsc4py actually parses PETSc makefiles
($PETSC_ARCH/conf/petscvariables) and uses that for build. So petsc4py
will use mpicc or plain gcc depending on the value of makefile
variables like PCC.

>    We would also like to add some nightly tests for petsc-dev/petsc4py-dev and help keep petsc4py-dev in sync with petsc-dev.
>

Having nightly tests running would be wonderful. About keeping it in
sync with petsc-dev, I have one additional issue: keep it working
against previous PETSc releases...

>Satish can you check into how you can add this?
>

Provided that Cython is installed, It is just a matter of following
the steps below:

cd petsc4py-dev
hg pull -u
python conf/cythonize.py
export PETSC_DIR=<...>
export PETSC_ARCH=<...>
python setup.py install --home=...|--prefix=....
python test/runtests.py


PS: I'll not be available until next Monday. But all what Barry wants
should be VERY easy to setup.

-- 
Lisandro Dalcin
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