[petsc-dev] I hate nagupgrade

[Jed Brown]

KAUST (or KSA?) internet can be flaky at times and my "make" was
(silently) hanging indefinitely while trying to connect to mcs.anl.gov.
Manually touching .nagged allows my build to proceed.  The hang could be
fixed by adding a reasonable timeout, but I can't find a timeout in
urllib.  Aron suggests that I try curl because all built-in Python url
libraries are terrible, but I don't think we can depend on curl being
installed, so we'd have to fall back to something.  We could implement a
timeout using threads, if threads weren't broken on some architectures.

Meanwhile, the professor next to me runs Little Snitch on his Mac and
wants to know why PETSc's build is trying to connect to Argonne's
servers.  His first thought was that it was a there for surveillance.


PETSc has a significant number of users that work behind firewalls or
are otherwise sensitive to outgoing connections.  Although nagupgrade
helps people stay updated and reduces some support email, I think it is
unprofessional and a failure mode that I'd rather avoid.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 818 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20141111/f8cea7bc/attachment.sig>