Hi all, I'm anticipating making a change to the petsc packaging but wanted to ask if there is anyone who prefers the current patch-specific packaging.
The default build of petsc installs into a patch specific location, meaning that 3.7.7 can be installed parallel to 3.7.6. I organised the petsc packaging to match this practice, allowing coinstallation of different patch versions if desired. My reasoning was that if upstream installs this way by default, then we should conform to that patch- specific approach. But within a given minor version (3.7 here), the patch versions are ABI compatible with same sonames (libpetsc.so.3.7). So we could override the default installation to provide just one installation in a 3.7 subdir rather than 3.7.z. In fact the petsc4py author advises me that he thinks it's overthinking it to provide coinstallable patch versions. He recommends providing just a single petsc 3.Y package. So with petsc 3.8 now released, I expect to drop the erstwhile patch- specific libpetsc3.8.0-dev / libpetsc3.8.0 packages in favour of a single libpetsc3.8-dev / libpetsc3.8 package. But first I want to give people a chance to speak up in case they can see any benefit in continuing to provide coinstallable patch-specific versions of PETSc. So speak up if you'd like to keep the petsc packaging the way it is for PETSc 3.7.z :) Drew
