[petsc-dev] Sean is going to love this

[Sean Farley]

Jed Brown writes:

> Sean Farley <sean.michael.farley at gmail.com> writes:
>> 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.
>
> I think variants are a crutch for poor plugin support.  I would prefer
> for PETSc to offer these as plugins that can be built and distributed
> separately.  Then one can install petsc-superlu, petsc-mumps, etc.

That's fair. I meant more from the package manager side (where we
usually don't have control to change the package's project to use this
kind structure). MacPort's variants themselves have their own problems
but that is a different issue.