Jed Brown writes:

Sean Farley <[email protected]> writes:

...

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.

I think variants are a crutch for poor plugin support. I would prefer for PETSc to offer these as plugins that can be built and distributed separately. Then one can install petsc-superlu, petsc-mumps, etc.

That's fair. I meant more from the package manager side (where we usually don't have control to change the package's project to use this kind structure). MacPort's variants themselves have their own problems but that is a different issue.