dolfin team mailing list archive

[Satish Balay <petsc-maint@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Anders Logg wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 07:39:51PM -0500, Barry Smith wrote:
> > 
> > > I don't understand. Isn't there always only one single PETSC_ARCH on
> > > each system you compile PETSc?
> > 
> >    WOW! Matter and anit-matter collide :-)
> > 
> >    The only reason for PETSC_ARCH is to support several different sets
> > of libraries simultaneously; especially debug and optimized but also
> > with different compilers etc. It is a rare day in hack that any machine
> > at ANL has only a single PETSC_ARCH built.
> > 
> >   If we didn't think multiple PETSC_ARCH's were important, we would just
> > use the "standard open-source" install model.
> > 
> >    Barry
> 
> I guess I live in a simpler universe where PETSC_ARCH=linux-gnu is a
> natural constant... :-)

Just to add to this - the 'equivalent' of PETSC_ARCH in the 'make;
make install' world is '--prefix' [use a different prefix when
configuring with a different set of configure options]

However packaging systems don't easily support multiple installs of
the same package [the default prefix assumed being /usr]

Satish