I was recently building PETSc on a system where /home is a slow NFS mount so of course I wanted to build on /scratch. However, since I want other nodes to use it, PETSC_DIR should really be in /home. My initial thought was to symlink from /home to /scratch, then move the directory after compilation of several configurations. This does not work due to os.path.isdir returning false for symlinks to directories, and the use of os.path.realpath to confirm that PETSC_DIR is the current directory.
Would it be reasonable to relax these checks to merely confirm that PETSC_DIR *points* to the current directory, or will that cause more confusion than it's worth? I wouldn't expect people to set up such symlinks unless they knew the score. Jed
