[petsc-dev] [Suggestion] Configure QOL Improvements

[Matthew Knepley]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 2:27 PM Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:

> Matthew Knepley via petsc-dev <petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:24 AM Faibussowitsch, Jacob via petsc-dev <
> > petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> >> As I am largely unfamiliar with the internals of the configure process,
> >> this is potentially more of an involved change than I am imagining,
> given
> >> that many libraries likely have many small dependencies and hooks which
> >> have to be set throughout the configuration process, and so its possible
> >> not everything could be skipped.
> >>
> >
> > We had this many years ago. It was removed because the benefits did not
> > outweigh the costs.
>
> I don't know if it's still the case, but it should be possible to run
> non-interactively (like apt-get -y).  My bigger complaint is that
> missing dependencies aren't resolved in the first couple seconds.
>

How do you know that you actually have something until you actually run the
tests? This is the classic
misconception of pkg-config, "I'll just believe the user", which generated
99% of user mail over the first
20 years of PETSc.

   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.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/>
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