[petsc-dev] Consider changing default installation instructions so that OS X users don't mix their MPI metaphors

[Aron Ahmadia]

Hi Satish,

That's reasonable.  What about the idea of adding the instructions to append
$PETSC_DIR/$PETSC_ARCH/bin to your path if prefix has not been used?

A

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 5:32 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Jun 2011, Aron Ahmadia wrote:
>
> > OS X and many Linux distributions now come with a system MPI.  If you
> > install by downloading MPICH and then use 'mpirun', your code will never
> run
> > in parallel, at best, or do something completely unexpected, at worst.
> >
> > The current default instructions are:
> >
> > export PETSC_DIR=$PWD
> > ./config/configure.py --with-cc=gcc --with-fc=gfortran
> > --download-f-blas-lapack=1 --download-mpich=1
> > make all test
> >
> > I think OS X-specific instructions that don't install MPICH or that
> > explicitly suggest appending $PETSC_DIR/$PETSC_ARCH/bin to your path when
> > running parallel jobs after installing mpich will help prevent users from
> > falling into this trap.
>
> The above are generic instructions which work everywere. There are
> more specific examples further down - which one can check.
>
> And OSX has broken MPI to start with - and even if we pander to that -
> most users will have issues. The best thing an OSX user can do is
> delete those files.  [yeah - one has to manually delete them - one
> can't uninstall them]
>
> Satish
>
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