Matthew Knepley <knep...@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 2:27 PM Jed Brown <j...@jedbrown.org> wrote: > >> Matthew Knepley via petsc-dev <petsc-dev@mcs.anl.gov> writes: >> >> > On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:24 AM Faibussowitsch, Jacob via petsc-dev < >> > petsc-dev@mcs.anl.gov> wrote: >> >> As I am largely unfamiliar with the internals of the configure process, >> >> this is potentially more of an involved change than I am imagining, >> given >> >> that many libraries likely have many small dependencies and hooks which >> >> have to be set throughout the configuration process, and so its possible >> >> not everything could be skipped. >> >> >> > >> > We had this many years ago. It was removed because the benefits did not >> > outweigh the costs. >> >> I don't know if it's still the case, but it should be possible to run >> non-interactively (like apt-get -y). My bigger complaint is that >> missing dependencies aren't resolved in the first couple seconds. >> > > How do you know that you actually have something until you actually > run the tests? This is the classic misconception of pkg-config, "I'll > just believe the user", which generated 99% of user mail over the > first 20 years of PETSc.
All other build systems get this right. You're asking to build X and Y, where Y depends on Z, and there is no --download-Z or --with-Z. You shouldn't need to build X before noticing that Z is unavailable.