[petsc-dev] automatically updated git sample repositories

[Barry Smith]

    We want our users to us a revision control system, we’d like them to have it at some publicly available place. We should make the process for them to do this as trivial as possible. I suggest the following 

1) we select 2 linear examples, 2 nonlinear examples and 2 TS examples (structured grid and unstructured grid) from our suite as prototypical examples for users to start with 
2) have a git repository for each (named 3.5-sample-linear-structured for example) which contains the source file(s) and the simplest makefile
3) we make the actual source in these examples to be identical to examples in petsc-maint (and another set with petsc-master) through some of Jed’s git magic. 

We then tell people the first step for them is

1) make a bitbucket account
2) clone the appropriate example repository from petsc into their bitbucket account
3) clone from their bitbucket repository to their machine and start work

if they do this and have code questions we can trivially pull their repository and futze with it ourselves rather than badly emailed source code etc.

What suggestions do you all have to improve on this idea?  Unless someone proves this is a bad idea let’s do this before the next release.

Barry

Note: this really isn’t my idea, it is a variant of what Derek is doing with MOOSE.