[petsc-dev] [Mike McQuaid] Re: [Homebrew/homebrew-core] PETSc: import from homebrew-science (#23598)

[Jed Brown]

"Smith, Barry F." <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>    Lisandro,
>
>     I don't understand this. Are you saying that the PETSc installer installs a bunch of files it shouldn't so you strip them out 
> after the install is run? 
>
>    The PETSc installer is a nice flexible piece of python code. 

It's so "nice" that it's littered with TODO comments written years ago
by you about how it should do some of the things that Lisandro's script
is doing.

I now also see that it writes an uninstall script that would delete
/usr/bin if the user installed with --prefix=/usr.

It also doesn't fix permissions like every normal package does.  (This
is an issue if the user building the software doesn't have umask 022.)

> I don't understand why you people who understand which files shouldn't
> be installed don't just edit the installer to prevent it from
> installing things it shouldn't instead of writing ad hoc post-install
> cleanup scripts. Why is "fixing" the installer so difficult that you
> guys just leave it in a broken state for years? (The reason I don't
> "fix" it is that I don't know what needs to be fixed since I don't
> interact with the package managers.