[petsc-dev] circular dependencies SLEPc

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:45 PM Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>
>> Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> >> You can implement and register a PC in SLEPc (it would go in
>> libslepc.so).
>> >>
>> >
>> > I think this is the bad workflow solution. What Barry suggested will work
>> > and be MUCH easier for a developer. Isn't
>> > the point of our tools to make our lives easier, not to enforce rules
>> that
>> > make them harder?
>>
>> Circular dependencies with a special build process is an enormous
>> development and distribution tax.
>>
>
> The difference in the arguments here is that there are very specific
> problems with the "right" way,
> namely that I need to deal with two different repos, two testing systems,
> release schedules, etc.
> Whereas the taxes above are currently theoretical.

It isn't remotely theoretical.

You could propose merging SLEPc into the PETSc repository (similar to
what we did with TAO a while back) if you think "PETSc" code will
frequently need to depend on SLEPc, but creating a circular dependency
between separate packages is worse than having code in Vec that depends
on DM.