[petsc-dev] PetscCitations: software or underlying math

[Jed Brown]

This is responding to Matt's comment, which is a topic that we could use
more feedback on.

https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/0a8e8854d85628d5034c7879b76533cb3504de85#general-comments

Should the formal citations list (produced when running with -citations)
include underlying mathematical work or only tangible software that is
being executed?  I'm hesitant to include the mathematical background, at
least by default, because it is inherently non-scalable.

We could perhaps have multiple levels of verbosity, one of which is
basically "further reading".

Even with only software, applying automated citations recursively is a
scalability risk similar to the advertising clause in 4-clause BSD,
though the standard for publication about software tends to
self-regulate a bit, along with the relative dearth of people interested
in maintaining scientific software packages.

What do you think PetscCitations should be?
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