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

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 1:17 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>>
>
> I think we should persist the entire set of options used to configure for
> later
> interrogation, however we have not done that much so far.

CONFIGURE_OPTIONS is written to petscvariables and printed by make info.
I think fewer duplications is desirable.