[petsc-users] command line handling in PETSC 3.2, a simple fix for Wheezy?

[Jed Brown]

Alexei Matveev <alexei.matveev+petsc at gmail.com> writes:

> Dear List,
>
> While porting an application to the upcoming Debian Wheeze
> we noted a misbehaviour in command line parsing by PETSC 3.2.
>
> It looks like if a "--key value" pair is following a "--flag-with-no-value"
> option
> at the leading position, the key-value pair is being ignored. See minimal
> example below.
>
> Is this something known? Is there a simple fix that had a chance
> to convince Debian maintainers to apply it before 7.0 or even
> 7.0.1?

Historically, PETSc has not intended to support double-dash (--)
options, so if it worked with older versions, it was just coincidental.
In particular, --options did not work correctly with prefixes at any
time.  At the request of a user, I added support in

  commit 7cd08cec2432658160c70b3c529f243c3b7cdafe
  Author: Jed Brown <jed at 59A2.org>
  Date:   Tue Feb 28 13:45:41 2012 -0600

  Allow keys starting with --, handle prefixes as --prefix_option instead of -prefix_-option.

We thought of this as a feature rather than a bug fix at the time, but I
think it's highly unlikely that someone was depending on the weird
behavior, thus I think it's acceptable to backport.

Consequently, I've cherry-picked this back onto 'maint-3.2'.

  https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/branch/maint-3.2

Please roll your package from this branch, assuming that using petsc-3.3
is not an option for Wheezy.