On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith@mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

Certain PETSc "functions" are documented as being "Developer" level. Does this mean they will be in a "developer" API as opposed to the "user" API (for example in xxximpl.h instead of petscxxx.h)? Or will there not be a "developer" API at all and xxximpl.h merely provides access to the direct data structure.

I thought Developer meant "we are still figuring this out", or "you can really hurt yourself here", not "this is secret".

That was my impression too. I thought the actual internal stuff did not have a generated man page.

It's possible to be a bit more strict about this by enabling visibility. When configured using --with-visibility, internal functions become "invisible" outside the shared library (even those that aren't file-local). To make that more precise and explicit, we could use PETSC_INTERNAL instead of PETSC_EXTERN for those functions.