fenics team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 08:43:29PM -0500, Matthew Knepley wrote:
> "tomtzigt" <tomtzigt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >   Another sobering statistics is that for every line of code in the main
> > branch there are three lines of code needed in the infrastructure (build
> > system, regression system, QA, release engineering, etc.). The bigger your
> > system gets the more inertia the support system exerts on the core. Given
> > these statistics, and limited resources, you are effectively forced to
> > concentrate on doing few problems well. But you can expand your world of
> > influence by 'solving' integration problems with other efforts. This has a
> > secondary benefit and that is that trying to solve the integration problem
> > you get a close up view of another 'interpretation' of the same problem:
> > both in terms of software engineering as well as in mathematics. This
> > experience is very valuable and is gained in much less time then if you had
> > to do the whole package yourself. As the saying goes: A fool learns from his
> > own mistakes, but a genius learns from mistakes other people make.
> 
>   While this might convince a lot of people that configure, build, and packaging
> are inherently complex, I believe that no real hard thinking has been put into
> these components. Instead, we see slavish reproduction of what shuold have been
> throw away ideas and prototypes. Witness the longevity and dominance of make.
> Hopefully we have the courage to reinvent these broken systems in the same way
> that we plan to reinvent numerics. To reiterate, I do not believe that WE need
> to concentrate on a few problems, unless by that you mean first order nonlinear
> PDEs. We should allow anyone to easy construct and solve these. Its important
> to motivate ourselves with problems, but not to make them the focus of the system.

I agree, and we should probably give BuildSystem a shot at some point.

Matt, are you pushing it actively (web page, manual etc)?

/Anders