[petsc-dev] MatNullSpaceDestroy

[Lisandro Dalcin]

On 23 March 2011 20:09, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
> On Mar 23, 2011, at 5:58 PM, Lisandro Dalcin wrote:
>
>> Are you going to rename MatNullSpaceDestroy -> MatNullSpaceDestroy_
>> and add the backward compatibility #define? Changeset 1a6f5fc1c27b
>> broke petsc4py...
>
>   No, it was changed to the &object paradigm.
>
>   Basically what is happening now is that commonly used destroys are changed with the _ paradigm
>
>   Uncommonly used destroy are fixed to use the &object paradigm.
>

Understood... I'm going to fix petsc4py...

>
>   Don't like the fact that there are two paradigms well I could change everything to & immediately :-(
>

:-)

>
>   Barry
>
>   Eventually I want to switch to the &object paradigm for everything but I decided to be nice to Matt and leave the common ones with the same API so users don't have to change their codes much.
>

I still feel we should use a different approach for backward
compatibility... Perhaps adding a petsccompat.h header file (or even
compat/petscXXX.h headers) with backward compatibility macro defs and
even STATIC_INLINE routines, in order to help people switch
incrementally.

My concern is that if you do not make pressure on users RIGHT NOW to
forcibly notice there is a new API's, most of them are going simply
ignore the changes, pretend they old API is fine to use, and finally
cry in the next release petsc-3.3 because their code is finally
broken.

Please note that this is the approach I use for petsc4py, right now
petsc4py-dev can build back to petsc-3.0.0. Of course, a potential
petsccompat.h should have a reverse direction of compatibility for
what I have in petsc4py




-- 
Lisandro Dalcin
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