[petsc-dev] I hate nagupgrade

[Matthew Knepley]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:55 AM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

I find it hard to believe he is a science professor with that kind of
inference
from the data (you can see it retrieves a webpage). Maybe climate ;)


> 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.
>

urllib2 has the timeout argument, so we should switch. I am not sure I see
retrieving a webpage as unprofessional. Is there a better way to update
information, or do we want a model that is completely dead once downloaded?
I think people now assume that this is not true.

  Matt

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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