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

[Matthew Knepley]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 9:33 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:

> Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:
>
> >> Cray and others have admitted to doing this for as long as I've used
> >> PETSc.  It's possible to discourage it without setting land mines.
> >
> >
> > I guess my attitude is that most people using PETSc attempt to work
> > within the structures setup to use it. Cray people seem not to give a
> > fuck and just change stuff willy nilly until it works for them. Thats
> > fine. We can't stop them, but I am not motivated to enable them
> > either.
>
> I just don't see the value of RDict.  It's read interface right now is
> grotesque (requires a lot of code and knowing a lot of almost magic
> names, thus it gets copy-pasted).


Criticism of the interface is fine. Rewrite it. No one will stop you.


>   I'd mainly prefer a nicer read
> interface, but if we redo the read interface, I'd rather it come from a
> human readable source.  And less duplication is better.
>

This is the truly strange thing. You are advocating communicating between
programs by text files. This is a bizarre, and I thought dead, opinion. I
would much rather have structured data, than unstructured text that we
parse each time we want to do something.

   Matt

-- 
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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