[petsc-dev] prefix install and module file

[Barry Smith]

> On Jan 15, 2015, at 3:16 AM, Lisandro Dalcin <dalcinl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 14 January 2015 at 22:08, Aron Ahmadia <aron at ahmadia.net> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Pip is new and evolving why do they still cling to prefix only at install
>>> time?
>> 
>> 
>> You are not pip's use case.   Prefix is one of the last things on their
>> minds, since 99% of the time they are just installing into the system
>> prefix, and in other situations permissions are handled via virtualenv or
>> some other tool.
> 
> Folks, I have a proposal the issues. IMHO, the only pourpose of having
> setup.py at the root of the PETSc tree is to make it possible to "pip
> install petsc", that is, we should not expect people to run setup.py
> by themselves invoking the various Python's distutils/setuptools
> commands.
> 
> According to pip documentation,
> https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/reference/pip_install.html?highlight=egg_info#build-system-interface,
> "pip install" only uses "setup.py install", it never calls "setup.py
> build". So we can just update setup.py to do "configure
> --prefix=$PREFIX && make && make install" at setup.py's install
> command.
> 
> Do you all agree about these changes? If yes, then I'll proceed to
> update setup.py to flollow "the PETSc way" of building+installing.

    This sounds like it needs to be the solution but it has the drawback that the entire pip process has to be run as sudo (for system installs), the normal recommendation for ./configure, make, make install is only the make install is done as sudo. We've run into systems where if you try to use compilers etc as sudo "bad stuff happens".  (This is why Jed, Matt, and I object to the pip model)

    I say go ahead and make the change,

   Barry

> 
> 
> -- 
> Lisandro Dalcin
> ============
> Research Scientist
> Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering (CEMSE)
> Numerical Porous Media Center (NumPor)
> King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
> http://numpor.kaust.edu.sa/
> 
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