[petsc-dev] broken builds

[Jed Brown]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 15:56, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Distros have LOTS of manpower
>

I'm not sure I agree. The major distros have lots of people involved in core
aspects (a handful might even get paid), but they have tens of thousands of
community-maintained packages. They have to make the job of packaging easy
in order to have the community maintain so many packages. A lot of those
packages do upstream updates more frequently than most scientific libraries.

The part of the problem that is harder for PETSc is that there is more
variability in the environment we are installing into. The distros can
assume a certain set of base tools that work in a consistent way, where as
we need to be very careful about depending on anything.

Figuring out how to do a DESTDIR install is specific to a package, not
specific to the environment in which the install is taking place, therefore
it is no harder for us than for the (volunteer contributor to the) distros.

Sandboxing the compile/install or setting system permissions (e.g. via
fakeroot) would be harder for PETSc to do (because it's different on
different systems).
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