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

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 1:27 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> This gets into a separate discussion. I think Python info is more useful
> since its
> directly visible to scripts we might write.

Just call your Python parsing function.  But this gets back to my
earlier question: who needs to read RDict.db and for what purpose?