[petsc-dev] new configuration/compile system for PETSc

[Dmitry Karpeev]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 18:00, Dmitry Karpeev <karpeev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>
>> I frequently get this question: I have a code "blah", which has its
>> own build system (e.g., wmake), and I want to use PETSc solvers in it.
>>  How can I build the two together?  The usual answer I give that they
>> either have to (a) build their application using our
>> makefiles, or (b) include $PETSC_DIR/conf/variables, etc.
>
> These are both makefile-based solutions,
That's right.  And that's my point: what we offer now for
incorporating PETSc into other codes is somewhat limited.
> and "make getlinklibs" is a better
> ways to snarf the variables.
But only marginally.
> We could easily write a pkgconfig file for
> PETSc. Some people would like that, but pkgconfig doesn't really care about
> supporting multiple installs (different PETSC_ARCH). As I've suggested
> before, I think we should have a pure Python script that provides the
> information in a machine-readable way (listing library paths without
> "-Wl,-rpath," flags that may need to be adjusted if the user is not linking
> exactly the same way that PETSc was, correctly handle shared versus static
> linking, etc).

I think another way would be to simplify the writing of "configure
modules" for libraries built using
some set of standard tools (e.g., GNU packages built with
configure/make, etc). We already configure
these packages internally (e.g., mpich).  If a user could write a
simple foo.py that configured/built their
favorite package with PETSc as a dependency, they could then proceed
to modify the FOO code and jack
PETSc into it. At the same time they couldn't have to parse the output
of make getlinklibs, etc.

Dmitry.