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

[Dmitry Karpeev]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 18:30, Dmitry Karpeev <karpeev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>
>>  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.
>
> But this just a different form of asking them to adopt our build system,
> except that makefiles are a de-facto standard and our system won't be
> familiar to anyone. Any system has to be easily usable from other systems
> (at least makefiles, automake, and cmake).

Yes, but there is also a practical problem: an engineer or a scientist, not
intimately familiar with automake, cmake, etc., has taken the effort
to understand
PETSc so that our linear solvers can be substituted for FOO's.  How can we
make it easier for these people to insert PETSc into their code?  Here
I only mean
the build process.  Maybe making them write foo.py is not the right approach,
but we should have a usable approach (and, maybe, an example of doing it).

In particular, is it sufficient to export linklibs, or do we also need
to export the
compiler (e.g., to ensure consistent Fortrant name mangling)?  There are
a good number of Fortran users that want to use PETSc too.

Dmitry.