[petsc-dev] broken nightlybuilds (next vs next-tmp)

[Jed Brown]

Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> On Sat, 11 Nov 2017, Matthew Knepley wrote:
>
>>  And that makes my point. The time for me to login to cg, set
>> everything up, and run the tests should be automated, and in fact we
>> already did that for next, which is what should be used.
>
> You can automate an ssh command run a test on cg - [if you don't want
> to run tests on your laptop]
>
> But this is a fundamental problem.
>
> When next model is promoted for integration testing - and Jed keeps
> justifying it with all the benefits it would have - and any one of us
> short-cirucits it by using it for 'local testing' which I think is a
> prereqisite for next model - our next model is broken and will remain
> broken.
>
> Another reason why Barry wants to throw away this model.

It's really just the same reason again.

My proposal is to create

1. "pretty good" testing that runs locally in <5 minutes

2. a recommended PETSC_ARCH using an open source compiler (gcc or clang)
   that finds common bugs; this is probably complex, int64, etc.

3. continuous integration that runs this "pretty good" suite above on
   weird architectures in a few minutes for all PRs and flags them on
   the web interface + notifies the author.

These are small, desirable practices in any case.  If we do this and
people are still abusing 'next', we can revisit what has gone wrong.