[petsc-dev] Sean is going to love this

[Karl Rupp]

Hi,

>> 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.

I cannot agree more with Jed on this. Although defining a sufficiently 
powerful plugin system for this isn't easy and would require us to 
rethink the whole build process, it has the potential of reducing the 
number of support requests on building PETSc substantially, just because 
inexperienced users can then rely on package managers to setup  a PETSc 
tailored to their needs.

Ideally we could preserve the following two options:
a) building a 'fat' PETSc lib with packages compiled into libpetsc.so
b) a 'slim' libpetsc.so which loads additional packages from e.g. a 
plugin folder.
We already have a), but I'm not entirely sure whether we can (and want 
to?) reasonably support option b) without giving up parts of a).

Best regards,
Karli