[Dune-devel] [GSoC2016] SuperLU v5 support. Ticket #1704

[Christoph Grüninger]

Hi Maikel,
I liked reading your patch. Thanks for providing it! I am
pretty sure we are going to include this patch after some
minor revisions.

> I made a test setting a macro HAVE_GLOBALLU_T_IN_UTIL which 
> fails for older versions, because they moved the structure
> definition to match the function calls better i think. It
> would be way better to test wether we can link against
> solver functions having the correct signature instead
> of this "hack" (taking 22 instead of 21 arguments). Because 
> that is semantically what we actually want to know. I
> will probably do that.

Your current approach is ok. That's what we already do to
detect older versions.
I'd like to get a shorter variable name and to include
SUPERLU in it. What's about HAVE_SUPERLU_GLOBALLUT?

> I have tested with SuperLU 4.3 and SuperLU 5.1.1 but it 
> shouldn't be much different with 5.0. I changed the
> script for finding the library to only look for 5.1.1
> and not 5.0 because i havent that version yet.

You can include 5.1 and 5.0, too. I'll give them a try
before merging this feature.

> Does this mean the results are ok? I havent looked much at 
> what the tests do test.

Yes, when they pass you are fine. That's the idea of tests,
unless they fail, most people do not need to look into them.

Quoting your code:
+CHECK_C_SOURCE_COMPILES("
+typedef int int_t; /* WTF this SuperLU... */
+#include <supermatrix.h>

Please don't use strong language, neither in code or in
communication. Nevertheless, I - and probably most of the
users of SuperLU - feel you pain…

Great! I consider your junior job fulfilled. But I welcome
if you try to polish the patch and get it included.

> But I also looked at some of the projects for GSoC nad have 
> some questions. Shall i write to the mailing list or directly
> to the mentors?

We prefer discussions in public. But if you feel it should
stay private, you could choose private mail. In general,
there are not that many GSoC students on our mailing list,
so we can track who comes up with a cool or clever idea.

Thank you for the patch,
Christoph

-- 
Je n'ai rien contre les étrangers, quelques uns de mes 
meilleurs amis
sont des étrangers. Mais ces étrangers là ne sont pas de chez 
nous!
[Agecanonix, Astérix - Le cadeau de César]