[petsc-dev] Is ./configure --help broken?

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> I agree. We should remove all code (about 2/3 of it) which does a
> hierarchy of communicating dicts (the original design). That would
> make everything simple.  No threads, no parents, etc. We leave in the
> help the way we want it, types for args, etc. One thing its notably
> missing, and that PETSc Options are missing, is listing the thing that
> set the option (default, command line, code, env).

Does RDict even need to be persistent?  Who all reads it?  I wonder if
an existing human-readable file would be sufficient instead?