[petsc-dev] automatically updated git sample repositories

[Barry Smith]

On May 22, 2014, at 9:27 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:

> Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
> 
>>    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 can do this with git subtree split.  If we only ever edit these via
> the PETSc repository, it can be completely automated (because there will
> never be a merge conflict).
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Good, but they have to set public permissions for us to do that.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Those should probably be placed in $PETSC_DIR/examples/.  I think we
> only want one example of each (otherwise it's confusing).  Don't know
> what to do about structured vs. unstructured.

   I’ve tried several times over the years to have a “higher quality” examples elsewhere then the usual subdirectory spots and it has always failed with dead unmaintained outdated code. Can we have links in git (and the tar ball) from the examples to to this “special directory”.

   We need to have both structured and unstructured (plex) examples for each. Why is that confusing?

  Barry