[petsc-dev] worthless information

[Vijay S. Mahadevan]

> I've looked at Waf a few times and I think it gets some things right, I just
> think it's still pretty far from a viable alternative at this point.

It was originally a fork of SCons. And in some ways, faster and better
than the latter. But it is a young project and each version does
introduce some drastic changes in the API... a definite downside to
depending on an external package to configure your own.

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 15:32, Vijay S. Mahadevan <vijay.m at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I've been using them for several years and have found them to be
>> powerful to extract expressions I care about. Most often, they are
>> handy in the configuration process.
>
> I was mostly kidding around. I use regexes sometimes, I just think they're
> overused (abused to do things that a more "real" parser should be used for).
> I don't consider truncating the version output to be a bad usage, though
> there actually needs to be a far more involved detection of versions in
> order to pass the correct command line options and to deal with quirks (e.g.
> we have a workaround to activate -Wno-line-truncation for gfortran-4.5.x
> because otherwise it gives lots of false positives).
>
>>
>> > FWIW, we care at least as much about the path of the compiler as its
>> > version. Usually the first word of "mpicc -show" has this (provided
>> > spaces
>> > in paths are escaped appropriately).
>>
>> I do not think mpicc -show gives the full path either.
>
> Depends whether MPI was configured with a full path to the compiler.
>
>>
>> I've personally not used waf much on batch systems yet but have used
>> to configure and build against several dependencies
>> (petsc/slepc/libmesh/deal + other C++ libraries). I had to write a few
>> utilities of my own on top of the original waf system to get this
>> right though for a complex system like PETSc, there might be some
>> additional needs.
>
> I've looked at Waf a few times and I think it gets some things right, I just
> think it's still pretty far from a viable alternative at this point.