Barry Smith writes:
>> On Dec 23, 2014, at 1:38 PM, Sean Farley <sean.michael.far...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Karl Rupp writes:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> I cannot agree more with Jed on this. Although defining a sufficiently
>>> powerful plugin system for this isn't easy and would require us to
>>> rethink the whole build process, it has the potential of reducing the
>>> number of support requests on building PETSc substantially, just because
>>> inexperienced users can then rely on package managers to setup a PETSc
>>> tailored to their needs.
>>>
>>> Ideally we could preserve the following two options:
>>> a) building a 'fat' PETSc lib with packages compiled into libpetsc.so
>>> b) a 'slim' libpetsc.so which loads additional packages from e.g. a
>>> plugin folder.
>>> We already have a), but I'm not entirely sure whether we can (and want
>>> to?) reasonably support option b) without giving up parts of a).
>>
>> While I definitely agree with both Karl and Jed, I think there are
>> easier targets to hit to help package managers. The current rough spots
>> I deal with are:
>>
>> 1) Non-standard prefix
>>
>> This is by far the biggest one and would require, I'm sure, much
>> discussion. The desired outcome would be a PETSc installation into
>> $PREFIX/{bin,etc,include,lib,libexec,man,var,www}. No other directories
>> (seems to only be 'conf') would be allowed.
>
> What about share? Isn't that a legal place to put stuff?
>
> Should we be putting the conf stuff into etc? var? share? Just don't save
> it anywhere?
That's entirely up to you of where to put it. Jed, I'm sure, can advise
on which files in 'conf' to put into etc, var, or share.
>> 2) Multiple installations
>>
>> Not as high on the list but still would be nice.
>>
>> 3) Don't warn the user about environment variables
>>
>> It is an unfortunate fact that some package managers set environment
>> variables. I manually use the correct --CC, --FC, etc. but still get a
>> warning. I think a simple fix for this is to not show the warning if the
>> command line arg is set.
>
> Yes, this is silly. I've prepared a branch
> barry/no-warning-for-overwritten-environmental-variable
Awesome!
