[petsc-users] Python version needed for internal scripts

[Pierre Jolivet]

Hello Nicolas,

> On 14 Oct 2020, at 12:00 PM, Nicolas Barral <nicolas.barral at math.u-bordeaux.fr> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Apologies if the question has already been asked, but the ML archive search seems to be broken (or has it never worked ?).

What do you mean broken? Can’t you access this URL https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/ <https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/> ?
I know that some French ISP are getting blocked by the ANL firewall, but I don’t think I've ever had this issue with the ML.

> Many petsc scripts require a 'python' executable, which python should that be ? For now, python3 seems to have worked with the configure scripts and petsc_gen_xdmf scripts, but can I safely assume it will always be the case ?

This was discussed in great length in the ML when 3.13.5 (or was it 3.13.4?) was released (because it was kind of broken at first), see https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/htdig/petsc-dev/2020-April/025879.html <https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/htdig/petsc-dev/2020-April/025879.html> + https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/merge_requests/2818 <https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/merge_requests/2818>
This was then patched some more https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/merge_requests/2831 <https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/merge_requests/2831> because some Python versions are not shipping distutils.sysconfig which is mandatory for the configure to go through.

I think you can assume that a correct Python version will be picked up for you by configure. If this is not the case, we will need to fix this (by adding another check?).

Thanks,
Pierre

> 'python' is usually an alias for python2, so making it point at python3 seems a bit dangerous. Yet, python2 was removed from recent Ubuntus and maybe others, and if I have no python2 installed, and no 'python' alias, I have to manually edit all the scripts.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> Nicolas

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