[petsc-dev] Monitor changes

[Barry Smith]

On Aug 13, 2011, at 5:40 PM, Jed Brown wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 17:30, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> Yes we have to fix our testing process so one doesn't need to constantly change the output files.
> 
> Would it be hopeless to have the view routines always write JSON and then format it using a filter that doesn't have detailed semantic knowledge of each part? Alternatively, a lot of the output could be parsed in current form without _that_ much semantic knowledge (petscplot needed this), so we could recover numeric values and do some sort of fuzzy comparisons when deciding how severe a mismatch is. The comparison for convergence monitors needs semantic knowledge that it is a convergence monitor anyway.

  Perhaps a JSON output (or whatever) for testing and the same output contains information on the criteria for acceptable difference.  In addition this testing output won't be "mixed" together like it is now, for example

   0 SNES Function .....
       0 KSP ....
       1 KSP ...
   1 SNES Function ...


   In JASON should be 

     KSP   0 stuff 1 stuff ....    (acceptable diff information)
     SNES 0 stuff 1 stuff ....   (acceptable diff information)


   Barry