[petsc-dev] Removal of PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE?

[Shri]

I was fairly new to PETSc during this time and I guess Barry (or Hong?) asked me to remove the support for PETSC_VIEWER_NATIVE. I don't recall any rationale that I had for removing this support and then putting it back later. From the commits, I see that I was working on updating MatLoad() and VecLoad() during this time.

Shri

On Aug 8, 2013, at 9:17 AM, Jed Brown wrote:

> 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