[petsc-dev] related to compiling your source code

[Barry Smith]

  Mark,

    You have not addressed the issue of people have a stale PETSC_OPTIONS. Why is that any less likely then a stale .petscrc?


   Barry

  Note that based on our experiences with ./configure people generally have lots and lots of stale environmental variables set in their .bashrc that they don't know about. Hence we turn them all off before starting ./configure

> On Apr 14, 2015, at 6:52 PM, Mark Adams <mfadams at lbl.gov> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 5:51 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> > On Apr 14, 2015, at 4:45 PM, Mark Adams <mfadams at lbl.gov> wrote:
> >
> >
> > >
> > > This has never been a problem.
> >
> >    I suspect this is because almost no one knows about PETSC_OPTIONS and uses it.
> >
> >
> > This could be a migration path for people using ~/.petscrc ...
> 
>   So people start using PETSC_OPTIONS. They do the same stupid thing of setting something and forget about a year later and then we have to remove PETSC_OPTIONS.  Why do we want to migrate them to something just as dangerous?
> 
> 
> Do we have any idea of the number of users that use ~/.petscrc ?
> 
> If no one is using it other than us then we switch and there is no problem.  I have never thought of using it.  I never have global options that I always want to use like this.  Does anyone other than us for regression tests?
> 
> The problem we have seen is someone has some temporary junk in their home directory and it gets picked up.  No one uses .bashrc as a scratch pad but people do use their home directory this way.
>