[petsc-dev] reproducibility

[Matthew Knepley]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 12:32 AM, Karl Rupp <rupp at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Hey,
>
>
> >         With -citations, or in addition to it, we should have some flag
>
>>     that causes the print out of the unique version information for each
>>     package used in a computation. Since computations are often done
>>     "between" version releases or with "randomly" patched releases how
>>     can we capture that information?
>>
>>
>> I think getting version information from other packages is pretty
>> worthless (how many times has SuperLU
>> had a shadow release). However, for all the packages that we control, we
>> can get the SHA1 very simply.
>> So a list of SHA1s for all packages would be meaningful.
>>
>
> Yeah, SHA1 is fine. One problem, however, is the reverse-lookup, i.e.
> trying to 'find' the correct packages with given SHA1s in order to e.g.
> reproduce some results. If we provide all external packages out of our own
> download repositories, we can keep track of the SHA1s in use. With external
> download URLs, however, such a trace-back might be fairly hard or even
> impossible. Thus, we might want to consider some date information in
> addition to the SHA1 just to have a hint in case a SHA1 cannot be matched.
>

I am saying its not possible without managing the repo.

  Matt


> Best regards,
> Karli
>
>


-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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