[petsc-dev] Removal of PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE?

[Jed Brown]

Shri, quite a while back now, you removed a bunch of support for PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE:

https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/742cafdd48f845c927348e65bdee73999c739268

and then added some of it back

https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/f440316591b37bf1119cb52801fe97b42a9e8902

Since this commit, there is no way to view vectors in native format and
only MPIDENSE matrices that can be viewed in native format.  All other
cases ignore the format, and in particular, DMDA vectors cannot be
viewed in PETSc ordering.

This is a big behavioral change that was not documented and makes
debugging certain things a hell of a lot harder.  We have had a number
of flawed petsc-dev and petsc-maint threads in which we gave advice to
use PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE, but that advice would have been wrong since
PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE has done nothing for years now.

What was the rationale behind this change?


Note this thread from a week before the commits above, though
PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE was being used for a totally different purpose.

http://mail-archive.com/search?l=mid&q=C57DDD9D-96DE-474C-B471-D6A918AC55B7@mcs.anl.gov
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