On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 17:51, Matthew Knepley <knepley@gmail.com> wrote:

Not only is it useful, its needed by petsc4py :)

Only because petsc4py is managing a different object model where "DA" is a subtype of "DM". It is not useful to C callers without also having petsc4py/src/include/custom.h.