[petsc-dev] reminder never use #include "mylocalinclude.h" in PETSc source

[Jed Brown]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 16:22, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> What bothers me about this one is that private has no hierarchy and will
> eventually become cluttered with all kinds of stuff from many different
> places in PETSc.
>

How many shared headers are there really?


>
>  The reason private was introduced (rather than having all of the private
> includes directly in the source tree) was sometimes external tools
> (Lisandros python stuff?) needed access to the files with a --prefix install
> so it had to go in the include directory. I really like having it in the
> source (I could give a shit about parts of PETSc source being built
> independently from the source tree).
>

What about friendliness towards people writing plugins for PETSc. For
example, creating a matrix format that is perhaps licensed differently from
PETSc and thus not distributable with PETSc itself. So this new format would
be compiled somewhere and the shared library dropped in a directory that
PETSc inspects in PetscInitialize so it looks to the user like a first-class
implementation (and the application need not even be recompiled). Of course
this only works if the plugin can be compiled in an environment where it has
access to the headers it needs. Those might not be present in a
prefix-install.

It would be a shame to distribute your plugin, but not be compilable with
the vendor-provided install of PETSc that used prefix like most other
libraries.


>  Maybe the private includes should be fixed up to contain (1) what is truly
> needed in the --prefix directory hence must in the include tree and what (2)
> belongs somewhere in the source tree.
>

In my opinion, it is not a matter of whether Lisandro needs them, but rather
a decision of which types are "open" in the sense that implementation
inheritance is intended versus "closed" in the sense that it is not. This
also affects using "static" for implementation functions.
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