[petsc-dev] Sean is going to love this

[Sean Farley]

Matthew Knepley writes:

> On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>
>>
>>   In the past we've been not particularly supportive of getting PETSc in
>> Linux package systems, in fact we've been a bit antagonistic.  We should
>> change this.
>
>
> I have the same objection as before, namely that many of our users want
> extra packages. Moreover,
> even the ones that start with a plain vanilla installation often want to
> add packages later.

The only way to do this, in my experience, is if the package manager has
something like 'variants' (macports and homebrew have it, at least, I
don't know about others):

port install petsc +superlu +mumps +mpich +hdf5 +hypre ... etc.

> Thus, I could see us being distributed by a package manager IF we retained
> the ability to reconfigure
> and rebuild. I would like the packaged version to retain all the configure
> stuff and ARCH directory so
> that a user can call the reconfigure script with extra arguments and
> rebuild the package themselves.

Sigh. I really don't want to get into why this is a bad idea
(reproducibility, stability, etc.). Not to mention, most package
managers elevate permissions to root (or a special user) for the sole
purpose that a user doesn't muck up the installation tree.

In the macports world, most PETSc requests come from dolfin (FEniCS) or
PETSc4py, for what it's worth.