[petsc-dev] easyinstall for petsc4py

[Lisandro Dalcin]

On 5 August 2010 15:16, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>>
>> All this assuming a previous installation/build of PETSc is available.
>> Barry, Do you actually mean that "easy_install petsc4py" should handle
>> the download and build of core PETSc?
>
>    As Matt says in too many words "absolutely"
>    We'd like to remove all the pain of using petsc4py so it will be
> trivially used with packages like SAGE and Scipy etc. It is too painful now
> for Python users since it requires installing PETSc manually.
>    The reason I want to look for mpi4py is to determine what MPI it was
> built with so PETSc would be built with the same MPI (and hence can be used
> with mpi4py).
>    Barry
>

OK, now  I can see what all you want. However, I think mpi4py would
not help you on this. mpi4py does not have a real configure step... It
just look for 'mpicc' compiler wrapper in $PATH and uses it if found.
If not found (eg. on Windows), things do not work out of the box,
users have to edit a mpi.cfg file provinding include an library dirs
and libraries to link. And that information is not recorded on the
mpi4py install, so basically mpi4py cannot tell us any info about the
MPI it was built with. Add to all this that Python's distutils is
kinda fragile and you have to constantly hack and monkeypatch things.

Perhaps what we really need is a super-script (with GUI?) that manages
the download and install of PETSc, SLEPc, mpi4py, petsc4py and
slepc4py?

PS: You may think I'm lazy/idiot/whatever, but mpi4py and petsc4py
buildsystems are very limited, this is because I constrained myself to
implement it with standard Python distutils and live with that.

-- 
Lisandro Dalcin
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