dolfin team mailing list archive

["Martin Sandve Alnæs" <martinal@xxxxxxxxx>]

2008/5/9 Andy Ray Terrel <aterrel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> I hit a bug where my mesh generation script was giving me a zero volume
> cell.  I believe in an older version of dolfin this threw an error in the
> assembly process. For my code it just output nan's in the matrix and then
> the solver told me the matrix was singular.  I was wondering how hard would
> it be to throw the error in assembly, the current flow makes things
> difficult to debug.
> -- Andy

An alternative for this particular problem could be assembling the vector
  e = FiniteElement("DG", polygon, 0)
  v = TestFunction(e)
  a = v*dx
which should yield 0 only for cells with zero volume. Right?

But in general, I think DOLFIN would really benefit from more extensive
error checking a lot of places. Relying on pretty syntax is not enough,
providing good error messages is much more important for usability.

--
Martin