On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:03 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 15:56, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote: > >> Distros have LOTS of manpower >> > > I'm not sure I agree. The major distros have lots of people involved in > core aspects (a handful might even get paid), but they have tens of > thousands of community-maintained packages. They have to make the job of > packaging easy in order to have the community maintain so many packages. A > lot of those packages do upstream updates more frequently than most > scientific libraries. > > The part of the problem that is harder for PETSc is that there is more > variability in the environment we are installing into. The distros can > assume a certain set of base tools that work in a consistent way, where as > we need to be very careful about depending on anything. > > Figuring out how to do a DESTDIR install is specific to a package, not > specific to the environment in which the install is taking place, therefore > it is no harder for us than for the (volunteer contributor to the) distros. > This is exactly my point. The manpower is in having individual package maintainers, which is what we would need and not have. > Sandboxing the compile/install or setting system permissions (e.g. via > fakeroot) would be harder for PETSc to do (because it's different on > different systems). > Yes, nightmare. We need to have enough to make the system work, so we can get real work done. Matt -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20110830/6b4a4e5c/attachment.html>
