[petsc-users] VecLoadIntoVector

[Jed Brown]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:09:29 -0600, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>     Part of this is because I hesitate to add any additional data to  
> the binary file for fear it will break its 15 years of portability.  
> Yes, it is ironic that I never care about PETSc source code  
> portability over time, but one can literally load today any vector or  
> matrix that was saved 15 years ago.

Agreed, this type of compatibility is way more important than API
compatibility.

> We might want to think of an extensible way to add this additional
> information.

As a long-term solution, I don't think extra metadata should be placed
into the binary files.  I think we actually desire more semantic
information than can practically be placed in these files, because a lot
of this information is actually relational.  So I think the right thing
is to point the viewer at the file with all the relational and semantic
information, and have the XLoadIntoX set itself up according to this
metadata and then read the binary file.  This proposal is for a
completely new viewer implementation, although it may still use
low-level functions from current viewers.  (We had a brief discussion
about this on -dev recently.)

Jed