[firedrake] The wonderful world of firedrake-install

[Lawrence Mitchell]

> On 27 Aug 2015, at 23:57, Justin Chang <jychang48 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> David,
> 
> A few comments:
> 
> 1) If I run that script (w/ --developer) and have the latest installed
> petsc-dev and established $PETSC_DIR, the installation of petsc4py
> will produce an error similar to the one reported in this thread:
> http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-users/2015-July/026404.html
> to which I had to either: a) use the patch Satish provided or b) clone
> from https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc4py and not mapdes/petsc4py. If
> I unset $PETSC_DIR then the installation works fine. Not a major
> problem or anything but it seems to me that the installation script is
> using a somewhat outdated petsc4py so I was wondering if this was
> intentional or not.


The installation uses a matching set of PETSc/petsc4py, that are "up-to-date" and known good.  But unfortunately it appears that if PETSC_DIR is set to a more recent PETSc, then the downloaded petsc4py might not match.  The script provides a warning in this case, but it was maybe missed in all the other output.  Perhaps if PETSC_DIR is set the script should exit with an error (overridable if you definitely want to use the external PETSc).

> 2) Some of my problems require some PETSc external packages like
> hypre, but I see that the default configure options only include
> chaco, ctegen, and triangle. I had to manually add the
> --download-hypre to the firedrake-install to get what I wanted, but do
> you think y'all can also include other important packages like mumps,
> superlu_dist, hdf5, metis, parmetis, etc?

You can add options to the petsc configure call by setting the environment variable PETSC_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS to appropriate values.  Make sure you include the necessary packages (chaco, ctetgen and triangle).  Perhaps instead one should be able specify additional PETSc configure options with something like:

firedrake-install ... --petsc-options="..."


Cheers,

Lawrence
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