[petsc-dev] Sean is going to love this

[Matthew Knepley]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 9:51 PM, Sean Farley <sean.michael.farley at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>
> 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
>

I don't care about any of those as much as scientific capability and
flexibility.


> 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
>

By the time they get Dolfin installation sorted out, I will be dead and the
discussion will be moot.


> PETSc4py, for what it's worth.
>

petsc4py already has a simple install through pip, and this is what
motivates my desire to reconfigure.

  Thanks,

     Matt

-- 
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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