On Mar 17, 2008, at 10:23 AM, Matthew Knepley wrote:

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 7:38 PM, Barry Smith <[email protected]> wrote:

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There are two significant changes I'd like to see before the next PETSc release:

1) remove the overly complicated (from a user perspective) matrix subclassing for the various external matrix solver packages and replace with MatSolverSetType() - mat_solver_type <type> that simply flips the various factorization/solver functions with those requested and

This seems not too hard. Just a layer on top to run the code a user must run now.

It is not very hard, but piling shit on top of shit is not the best way to write software. I have a method to reorganize that removes the old shit thus both simplifying the model and making it more user friendly.

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2) properly name-space PETSc by putting a Petsc in front of all PETSc objects, function names etc (this will require changing a few names also to keep them below the 32 character limit). This will be very painful change for some users who are not comfortable ever changing code, hence I hesitate to do it, but it is the right thing to do and should have been done originally.

I guess I still do not see the need for this. NIMROD is a not a sufficient driver in my mind.

You are an elitist who thinks that important ideas can only come from important/smart people. This I disagree strongly with, one should look everywhere, even at the local dump, for good ideas. NIMROD is not the driver, it is merely the spark.

If we really want namespaces, use a real language that has namespaces. There are plenty. If we are still using C, I say we stick with the old division. The imposition of this much pain on the overwhelming majority of users seems unjustified.

You seem to be saying we should stick with a bad decision I made many years ago, just because it is painful to change. When did you suddenly become conservative?

Namespaces issues can be trivially fixed in say C++, which we should do.

Matt

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Maybe we can do a release in around a couple of months, it would be 2.4

Barry

-- 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