On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 18:30, Dmitry Karpeev <karpeev@mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

If a user could write a
simple foo.py that configured/built their
favorite package with PETSc as a dependency, they could then proceed
to modify the FOO code and jack
PETSc into it.

But this just a different form of asking them to adopt our build system, except that makefiles are a de-facto standard and our system won't be familiar to anyone. Any system has to be easily usable from other systems (at least makefiles, automake, and cmake).