[petsc-dev] broken builds

[Barry Smith]

On Aug 30, 2011, at 2:15 PM, Jed Brown wrote:

> 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.

   It is not robust, but it is simple :-)   

    The Satish way (which is always the correct way) is to do rm -rf ${PETSC_ARCH} and then run ./configure again. 

   Barry