> On Apr 22, 2018, at 7:45 PM, Matthew Knepley <knep...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 8:41 PM, Jed Brown <j...@jedbrown.org> wrote: > "Smith, Barry F." <bsm...@mcs.anl.gov> writes: > > > Yuck, I think a far better user API is that PetscOptionsInsertFile() be > > callable before PetscInitialize(). The problem is that people have shoveled > > so much post-PetscInitialize() code into PetscOptionsInsertFile() over the > > years that stripping it all out would be painful. Maybe get a simplier pre- > > 2005 version of the routine and strip out the post-PetscInitialize() > > material? > > You want every rank to open the file independently? Or > PetscOptionsInsertFile somehow caches the file contents without using > PetscMalloc and broadcasts it after reaching PetscInitialize? That > seems a bit crazy. > > I am not for this "before PetcInitialize" strategy at all.
Why not. It was just stupidity on my part 20 years ago that I didn't think to make the various set options functions callable before PetscInitialize(). Better just to fix that oversight. > > However, I do think its far too fat. It initializes everything we can think > of without > giving the user and entry points in to customize it. That is compiler-level > user disempowerment. > > I would rather see us rearchitect Init() so that you have better control over > options, logging, > CUDA, and all the other initializations hiding in there. Make a concrete proposal. "better control" is pretty vague. > > Matt > > > Barry > > > > > >> On Apr 22, 2018, at 5:54 PM, Jed Brown <j...@jedbrown.org> wrote: > >> > >> For users that read their own configuration files and/or choose > >> PetscOptionsInsertFile after PetscInitialize, we don't have a good way > >> to avoid overwriting PETSC_OPTIONS or command-line options. The user > >> could manually find argv and the environment variable, but that's a poor > >> abstraction. Should PetscOptionsInsertFile learn how to behave so as to > >> add new entries to the options database, but not supersede any that > >> already exist? > > > > -- > 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 > > https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/
