On Tue, 30 Aug 2011, Jed Brown wrote: > On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:24, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > > > The Satish way (which is always the correct way) is to do rm -rf > > ${PETSC_ARCH} and then run ./configure again. > > > Yes, but the run-time of this operation is 2^{1 + millions of dollars paid > for machine} minutes so it clearly won't work at the exascale. You're going > to be left in the past if you keep thinking like that. > > > More seriously, rm -rf ${PETSC_ARCH} is horrible because you lose > reconfigure-$PETSC_ARCH.py if you don't relocate it first.
Yes - this is one drawback. Also there is another issue that 'rm -rf' adresses that --download-package=reinstall can't do easily [without a proper traker and uninstaller] All --download-package=reinstall can do is install the new one over the old one. This can can still break if the new one doesn't completely overwrite the old one. One example: --download-superlu can change from installing -lsuperlu4.1 to -lsuperlu4.2. Perhaps there are other suttle breakage senarios aswell.. Satish