On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 9:51 PM, Sean Farley <[email protected]> wrote:

Matthew Knepley writes:

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On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Barry Smith <[email protected]> wrote:

...

In the past we've been not particularly supportive of getting PETSc in Linux package systems, in fact we've been a bit antagonistic. We should change this.

I have the same objection as before, namely that many of our users want extra packages. Moreover, even the ones that start with a plain vanilla installation often want to add packages later.

The only way to do this, in my experience, is if the package manager has something like 'variants' (macports and homebrew have it, at least, I don't know about others):

port install petsc +superlu +mumps +mpich +hdf5 +hypre ... etc.

...

Thus, I could see us being distributed by a package manager IF we retained the ability to reconfigure and rebuild. I would like the packaged version to retain all the configure stuff and ARCH directory so that a user can call the reconfigure script with extra arguments and rebuild the package themselves.

Sigh. I really don't want to get into why this is a bad idea (reproducibility, stability, etc.). Not to mention, most package

I don't care about any of those as much as scientific capability and flexibility.

managers elevate permissions to root (or a special user) for the sole purpose that a user doesn't muck up the installation tree.

In the macports world, most PETSc requests come from dolfin (FEniCS) or

By the time they get Dolfin installation sorted out, I will be dead and the discussion will be moot.

PETSc4py, for what it's worth.

petsc4py already has a simple install through pip, and this is what motivates my desire to reconfigure. Thanks, Matt -- What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. -- Norbert Wiener