[petsc-dev] PETSc janitorial work

[Barry Smith]

> On Aug 23, 2022, at 11:16 AM, Blaise Bourdin <bourdin at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 
> What should be the proper format? Online or in person over a couple of days? Matt and I are about 1h away from each others.
> 
> The problem with research and cleaning projects is that we always focus on the fun part (research) and neglect cleaning..
> 
> I would personally rank extending the tests coverage pretty high in the priority ranking. Doing so will also help finding flaws in documentation and manual pages.
> This requires very little knowledge of petsc development.
> 
> What other low-hanging fruits can anybody think of?

  There are huge chunks of functionality in PETSc that to some degree have manual pages but is not discussed at all or only a tiny bit in the users manual. For example how to use MatProductCreate() is completely missing in the users manual. PetscFE, PetscST, DMSwarm, much of DMPlex and many others are not really in the users manual. Thus it is very difficult for non-hardcore people to get a handle on how to use much of the stuff in PETSc. At a minimum every MANSEC and SUBMANSEC should have a useful introduction to that material. Once we are able to make links from manual pages to the manual, automatically checking for missing MANSEC and SUBMANSEC in the manual would be trivial.

  Barry


> 
> Blaise
> 
> 
>> On Aug 23, 2022, at 10:09 AM, Nathan Collier <nathaniel.collier at gmail.com <mailto:nathaniel.collier at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> I would also participate. In general I would be happy to work more in PETSc--just need some more concrete direction in what would be useful.
>> 
>> Nate
>> 
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 9:45 AM Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com <mailto:knepley at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 9:37 AM Blaise Bourdin <bourdin at mcmaster.ca <mailto: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.
>> 
>> This is a good idea. I would participate. Also, I have some money to employ undergraduates. It would be great
>> if we could come up with projects that have some research and some cleaning.
>> 
>>   Thanks,
>> 
>>      Matt
>>  
>> 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 <https://www.math.mcmaster.ca/bourdin> | +1 (905) 525 9140 ext. 27243
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> 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/>
> 
> — 
> 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 <https://www.math.mcmaster.ca/bourdin> | +1 (905) 525 9140 ext. 27243
> 

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