[petsc-dev] Future of make?

[Barry Smith]

On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:04 PM, Matthew Knepley wrote:

> I would like to quit using 'make' in favor of builder.py. I have been doing this myself, but I have to
> constantly port the changes people make to the original build. Is there a reason to maintain make?

  ALL the examples. 

  New stuff we are just adding for Cuda builds. You will need to add support to builder for that.

  In order to be in a position to not maintain the "regular" make, several people, NOT JUST YOU, will need to know how to add new features, fix bugs etc. The old make sucks but a least 4 or 5 people can can work on it.  The sooner you make builder.py completely understandable (it is actually already somewhat understandable) then the sooner we can switch. Also it needs to handle all strange corner cases that make supports.

   Barry

> 
> Also, I pushed preliminary support for dependency checking into builder.py.
> 
>    Matt
> 
> -- 
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener