These pages are for people interested in using the development copy of PETSc (called petsc-dev) or contributing to the PETSc libraries. This information is intended only for people who are experienced with building, using, and debugging PETSc. If you cannot use makefiles, a debugger, and EMACS etags, then please don't access these pages.

Consider joining petsc-dev mailing-list.

How to:

Browsing source:

One can browse the development repositories at the following location

Obtaining the development version of PETSc:

You have three options
  1. download and install mercurial (recommended)
  2. access tarballs directly from our mercurial server.
  3. access the nightly tarball snapshot at http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/petsc-dev.tar.gz
1) To use mercurial - first install the software Once Mercurial is installed obtain petsc-dev with the following: PETSc can now be configured in the usual way, specified on the Installation page. To update your copy of petsc-dev Once updated, you will usually want to rebuild completely The Mercurial download always has the latest version of petsc-dev. For additional help use

2) One can obtain the current petsc-dev and BuildSystem repositories as tarballs from the mercurial server using the following URLs:

Note 1:

This mode is useful - if you are on a machine where you cannot install mercurial - or if it has a firewall blocking http downloads.

Note 2:

If using a web browser to download - the tarballs will get the names petsc-dev-CHANGESET.tar.gz and BuildSystem-CHANGESET.tar.gz. However, if wget or curl is used - both tarballs will get the name 'tip.tar.gz'. In this case rename the tarballs [to avoid the name conflict]. After both the tarballs are obtained - do the following:

To update this copy of petsc-dev, re-download the above two tarballs. Each time the repository gets new changesets, the above url will give the tarballs including the new changes.

3) The nightly tarball will be equivalent to the release tarball - with all the doumentation built. To use the nightly tarball snapshot, simply download http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/petsc-dev.tar.gz and extract it.

To update your copy of petsc-dev simply get a new copy of the tar file. The tar file at the ftp site is updated once each night [arround midnight CST] with the latest changes to petsc-dev.

Compiling and using the development copy (petsc-dev):

Use ./configure to install PETSc, (trouble? please contact us petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov). And subscribe to the petsc mailing lists.

Experimental build systems

Building documentation:

The documentation tools listed below (except for pdflatex) are automatically downloaded and installed by ./configure.

Once pdflatex (from teTeX) is in your PATH you can build the documentation with:

Sending patches to update the master copy of petsc-dev:

By submitting code, the contributor gives irretrievable consent to the redistribution and/or modification of the contributed source code as described in the PETSc open source license.

Please read the code standards chapter of the developer guide before sending patches.

One can send us changes to PETSc [perhaps bug fixes or new feature additions] via e-mail. One easy way to do this [if no new files get created] is:

To undo the changes, one can do 'hg revert' so that subsequent 'hg pull' or 'make pull' will continue to work.

Alternatively, one can send us patches using hg bundle as described at CommunicatingChanges

Once you have gained experience with developing PETSc source code, you can become an active member of our development and push changes directly to the petsc-dev repository. Send mail to petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov to arrange it.

Developer guide:

The developer guide gives an overview of the design and detailed style specifications.

Nightly builds:

The logs for the nightly builds at http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/nightlylogs

PETSc developers can automatically log into any PETSc test directory with ${PETSC_DIR}/bin/maint/petscgoto arch-of-test-system

The coverage(what lines of source code are tested in the nightly builds) can be found at http:/www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-dev/index_gcov1.html