[petsc-users] VecView to hdf5 broken for large (complex) vectors

[Jed Brown]

"Smith, Barry F. via petsc-users" <petsc-users at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>   So it sounds like spack is still mostly a "package manager" where people use "static" packages and don't hack the package's code. This is not unreasonable, no other package manager supports hacking a package's code easily, presumably. The problem is that in the HPC world a "packaged"
> code is always incomplete and may need hacking or application of newly generated patches and this is painful with static package managers so people want to use the git repository directly and mange the build themselves which negates the advantages of using a package manager.

I don't think people "want" to hack the packages that they don't
contribute to.  Spack provides pretty rapid distribution of patches.

What if PETSc had

  ./configure --with-mumps=spack

or some alternative that would check with spack to find a suitable
MUMPS, installing it (with Spack's dependency resolution) if not
available?  Then you could hack on PETSc with multiple PETSC_ARCH,
branches, incremental rebuilds, and testing, but not need to deal with
PETSc's crude package installation and upgrade mechanism.

Upon completion, the build could offer a yaml snippet for packages.yaml
in case the user wanted other Spack packages to use that PETSc.