[petsc-dev] damn symlinks on windows

[Jed Brown]

Aron Ahmadia <aron at ahmadia.net> writes:

> I don't understand why you guys create a symbolic link to the
> configure.log in the base directory.  This has always confused me, and
> I'm pretty sure I've accidentally sent a symbolic link or two from OS
> X at one point or another.  I think you should gzip and cp the
> configure.log over as part of a successful install, and leave it
> sitting in the main directory otherwise.  

I think configure.log should always be created in
$PETSC_ARCH/conf/configure.log.  It can be symlinked or copied to the
root directory at some later time, but creating it in the root directory
is an unnecessary race between multiple configure processes.

I would like to always gziping the results to keep our mailing list data
volume down.

> Advanced users may want to have the ability to have configure.log
> generated elsewhere (and you could make this a configure argument if
> you really felt like it), 

Actually, this would be useful because it would allow building a custom
version of PETSc without having write access to the directory containing
the source code.  So for example, you could create a new PETSC_ARCH from
a system-wide copy of the source code without needing to copy it to your
home directory first.

> but the symbolic links are both unexpected and confusing to beginners.

Well, symbolic links work properly on real operating systems. ;-)
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