[petsc-dev] Unused macros in petscconf.h

[Jed Brown]

Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 4:37 PM Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
>
>> Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 2:04 PM Smith, Barry F. via petsc-dev <
>> > petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >>   You are right, these do not belong in petscconf.h
>> >>
>> >
>> > The problematic thing here is hiding information from users of
>> > PETSc. If you are a user that counts on PETSc configure to check
>> > something, but then we hide it because we do not use it, I would not
>> > be happy.
>>
>> You want PETSc to test things that it doesn't use because maybe a user
>> would want to know?  Where does that end
>
>
> Very clearly it ends with testing the things users SPECIFICALLY ASKED
> US TO TEST on the configure command line.

They asked us to test the size of short and for the existence of sched.h
and mkstemp?

>> and how would we ever know if
>> the information is correct?
>>
>
> This is just nonsensical. We know its correct because we tested it.

Only by the code that decides whether to define the macro, but if one of
those tests is/becomes broken (this has happened), we wouldn't know.