[petsc-dev] PetscOptions defaults after PetscInitialize

[Smith, Barry F.]

  Yuck, I think a far better user API is that PetscOptionsInsertFile() be callable before PetscInitialize(). The problem is that people have shoveled so much post-PetscInitialize() code into  PetscOptionsInsertFile() over the years that stripping it all out would be painful. Maybe get a simplier pre- 2005 version of the routine and strip out the post-PetscInitialize() material?

   Barry


> On Apr 22, 2018, at 5:54 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
> 
> For users that read their own configuration files and/or choose
> PetscOptionsInsertFile after PetscInitialize, we don't have a good way
> to avoid overwriting PETSC_OPTIONS or command-line options.  The user
> could manually find argv and the environment variable, but that's a poor
> abstraction.  Should PetscOptionsInsertFile learn how to behave so as to
> add new entries to the options database, but not supersede any that
> already exist?