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

[Smith, Barry F.]

> On Apr 17, 2019, at 1:35 AM, Balay, Satish <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 

   I never said that any current practices are better than using spack! It is just that perhaps 
with a few tweaks spack could provide a way to fundamentally improve our current practices (which are, as you acknowledge cumbersome).

   Barry


> 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