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

[Balay, Satish]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2019, Smith, Barry F. via petsc-users wrote:

>   This is fine for "hacking" on PETSc but worthless for any other package. Here is my concern, when someone 
> realizes there is a problem with a package they are using through a package manager they think, crud I have to
> 
> 1) find the git repository for this package
> 2) git clone the package 
> 3) figure out how to build the package from source, is it ./configure, cmake, what are the needed arguments,... 
> 4) wait for the entire thing to build 
> 
> then I can go in and investigate the problem and provide and test the fix via a pull request. Heck I'm not going to bother.
> 
> Thus a lot of potential contributions of small fixes that everyone in the community would benefit from are lost. This is why, for 
> me, an ideal HPC package manager provides a trivial process for providing fixes/improvements to other packages.
> 
> For example Sajid could have easily figured out the VecView_MPI_HDF5() bug and provided a fix but just the hassle of 
> logistics (not ability to solve the problem) prevented him from providing the bug fix to everyone rapidly. 


Even without spack and multiple packages - this is not a easy thing to
do. For ex: most of our users install petsc from tarball.

And if they find a bug - they have to go through similar complicated
process [create a bitbucket account, get a fork - learn the petsc PR
process - make a PR etc].

With spack - I stick to the usual process - and don't get bogged down
by 'spack' support for this process.

If I see a breakage - I do 'spack build-env package [this has its own
issues] - attempt a fix - get it first working with a spack build.

[Alternative is to just edit the package file to get my fix - if its a patch I can find]


Once I have it working [the major issue is taken care off]. Then I
have a diff/patch and then worry about how to submit this diff/patch
to upstream.

Sure its a multi step model - and has many trip points. But is not
that our current petsc only model doesn't have any.

Satish