Matthew Knepley writes: > On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Barry Smith <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> In the past we've been not particularly supportive of getting PETSc in >> Linux package systems, in fact we've been a bit antagonistic. We should >> change this. > > > I have the same objection as before, namely that many of our users want > extra packages. Moreover, > even the ones that start with a plain vanilla installation often want to > add packages later.
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. > Thus, I could see us being distributed by a package manager IF we retained > the ability to reconfigure > and rebuild. I would like the packaged version to retain all the configure > stuff and ARCH directory so > that a user can call the reconfigure script with extra arguments and > rebuild the package themselves. Sigh. I really don't want to get into why this is a bad idea (reproducibility, stability, etc.). Not to mention, most package managers elevate permissions to root (or a special user) for the sole purpose that a user doesn't muck up the installation tree. In the macports world, most PETSc requests come from dolfin (FEniCS) or PETSc4py, for what it's worth.
