[petsc-dev] [petsc-users] Using PETSC with an openMP program

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> I guess my superficial response to this is
>
>   a) I do not consider Buildsystem "mine" anymore. I may still have the
> most lines of code, but I am not even sure of that.
>       However, I am interested in fixing problems, since I think it is
> still the best available way to do these things.
>
>   b) Broad criticisms are very useful as a way to introduce specific
> criticisms that can be worked on. Divorced from that
>       grounding, they are much less useful.
>
>   c) I believe that you have a hard time making modifications. I would note
> that this code has received a steady stream of
>       updates for its entire existence, so it is not impossible, but
> perhaps too hard.

A lot of those updates have been hacking something in locally (leading
to inconsistencies and varying assumptions) because refactoring is too
intimidating.

>   d) The particular problem you bring up is not that hard (I think) to fix.
> You go into RDict, which is the place where all options
>        are held. Put in a marker which gets set when the option is
> accessed, just as we do in PETSc. The problem is really
>        that configure is likely to produce many more false positives, as
> people often put in things that might not be accessed.
>        I am fine if that is what we want.
>
>   e) More broadly, the use of RDict is unrecognizable from the original
> design that Barry and I did 14 years ago. I think we
>       can just strip this out and replace it with something of equivalent
> functionality which is simpler and smaller.

Smaller and simpler would be fantastic.