[petsc-dev] PETSc janitorial work

[Barry Smith]

  I would prefer the term "housekeeping" or some other phrase rather than janitorial. 
  
  I think this is a great idea.

  One of the reasons I like to do housekeeping and keeping up with other people's housekeeping is that you can see what is repetitive and could be automated and simplified as you do seemingly the same thing for the eighth time. If nothing more, you can automate the quantification of where the housekeeping is most needed; for example, automatically generating what manual pages are missing or incomplete, what language stubs are missing etc. Some of the things changing now are 1) automatic rejection of badly formatted source code, 2) automatic rejection of buggy manual pages, 3) automatic rejection of syntax bugs in the user's manual, all with and an indication of where the problems are including as much as possible exact line numbers. Coming eventually will be automatic reports of what lines of source code are not test in the CI.



  Barry





> On Aug 23, 2022, at 9:36 AM, Blaise Bourdin <bourdin at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 
> All,
> 
> I think that there is quite a bit of low-skills / time consuming work which is a poor use of the main developers’ time: syncing C / Fortran / python headers, improving the tests coverage, proofreading the manual and man pages, etc.
> 
> I’d be more than happy to help organizing a virtual or in-person event focussing on such janitorial tasks, provided that we can get support from some senior developers to help and review. This could but does not have to be coordinated with the next pets users meeting.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> Regards,
> Blaise
> 
> — 
> Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Mathematical and Computational Aspects of Solid Mechanics
> Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics
> Hamilton Hall room 409A, McMaster University
> 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4K1, Canada 
> https://www.math.mcmaster.ca/bourdin | +1 (905) 525 9140 ext. 27243
>