[petsc-dev] Patches like this make me want to cry

[Sean Farley]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 5:41 PM, Paul Mullowney <paulm at txcorp.com> wrote:
> I moved all CUSPARSE functions into seqcusparse/aijcusparse.cu (and a
> similar mpi version). I was asked to do this some months ago. I did my best.
> I think it is significantly improved from before.
>
> I was also asked by multiple people to attempt to get Complex GPU
> capabilities working. I succeeded by making changes to petscmath.h. As Jed
> pointed out, some of the changes may have not been C99 compliant.
>
> There is one commented out function in aijcusparse.cu. That can easily be
> fixed.
>
> Many of the other changes (especially to .cu) files were made to protect
> against builds breaking because many of the CUSP preconditioners do not
> support complex arithmetic.

You seem to be addressing the specifics of the code; Matt and Jed are
talking about the process: patch reviews.

> I have asked for input from multiple people on several occasions and not
> gotten responses.
>
> What am I to do if I ask for input/feedback and don't get it?????

I saw no request for reviewing this patch series. How did you ask
people to review? I recommend (for everyone here) smaller commits.
Commit often. There is a great extension for editing changesets (i.e.
folding multiple changesets together, splitting changesets apart,
etc.) called histedit:

http://bitbucket.org/durin42/histedit

In fact, just today it was included into mercurial core for the next
version. I also recommend the 'record' extension (bundled with
mercurial). The next version of mercurial (2.3) promises better
bookmark functionality (for feature branches), built-in history
editing, and possibly evolution (for shared, mutable changesets).

If you have a bitbucket account (free), I would recommend working on
your own fork there so that others could review and you could mutate
the history based on said reviews.