[petsc-dev] broken builds

[Jed Brown]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:08, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> First he made the reasonable suggestion of adding feature a, then since
> that worked feature b, then why not c and d, by the time he got to q they
> were draining in complexity, nobody understood the software anymore and
> random things broke all the time.


The concept of a package manager, while apparently lost on Apple, is
well-established. These have a few functions:

install
upgrade
rebuild*
uninstall

*If the package is binary-only, then "upgrade" is needed if the ABI of a
dependency changes. If the package is built from source, then "rebuild" is
needed in this case.

PETSc --download-* provides only part of what a package manager does, but I
contend that "if you want to do X, find and delete a magic file named
hash(X), with poorly-documented hash() and run a command that does lots of
other things too" is not a more robust system.
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