On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 18:48, Matthew Knepley <[email protected]> wrote:

Yes, but you are advocating a really shitty infrastructure for doing this. How do you expose these when the user turns out to want them (like ParMetis for instance)? How do you follow the chain back to find a bug if you have build logic scattered all over?

The makefile is already used to indicate which files require optional packages. If the user wants those headers, they can add $PETSC_PARMETIS_INCLUDES to their compile line and $PETSC_PARMETIS_LIBS to their link line. (Yes, I think that EVERY variable brought in by conf/variables should be namespaced.) We shouldn't break the standard practices for shared libraries just because you might want to get access to all these optional things without stating that you want access.