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

[Matthew Knepley]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 6:25 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:

> Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 2:20 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
> >
> >> 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.
> >
> >
> > Parse a makefile to get info? This is too convoluted for my first choice.
> >
> >
> >> But this gets back to my earlier question: who needs to read RDict.db
> and
> >> for what purpose?
> >>
> >
> > 1) We read this to get the configure modules during install and other
> post
> > configure operations.
> >
> > 2) I would like us to read RDict.db to get the original configure
> > environment
>
> The problem is that RDict.db is opaque


This seems to be a normative characterization. I think the make variables
are
"dead" because its hard to make use of them in scripting.


> and some people edit
> petscvariables and/or petscconf.h to work around weird issues.


Awful. We should not encourage this. It should flow from the top.


>   We can't
> practically get rid of petscvariables without abandoning make.
>

The aim should not be to get rid of them, but rather to have them be read
only.


> It's also frustrating to debug because the names used in Python may not
> match the names used in human-readable output,


Changing this is trivial.

  Matt


> and that also prevents
> grepping to find unused variables.
>



-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener

https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/ <http://www.caam.rice.edu/~mk51/>
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