Reporting Bugs And Errors

The PETSc maintenance e-mail petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov is intended for users to:

  • Report bugs.

  • Ask for clarification.

  • Ask for help in tracking down bugs.

  • Request new features within PETSc.

  • Recommmend changes or additions to the development team.

Note

We respond to almost all email the same day and many within the hour. Please do not send maintenance requests to the individual PETSc authors; all e-mail to petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov is automatically distributed to all of the PETSc authors, so our response time using this address will be fastest.

Before sending a bug report, please consult the FAQ to determine whether a fix or work-around to the problem already exists. Also, see the chapter on performance tuning in the PETSc users manual for guidelines on achieving good efficiency within PETSc codes.

Guidelines For Bug Reports

The more information that you convey about a bug, the easier it will be for us to target the problem. We suggest providing the following information:

Don’ts

  • Please do NOT send winmail.dat Microsoft email attachments; we cannot read them.

  • Please do NOT stick huge files like configure.log DIRECTLY into the email message. Instead, include them as attachments.

  • Please do NOT paste your entire codes DIRECTLY into the email message. Instead, include them as attachments. Small snippets of code are acceptable however.

Do’s

  • Detailed steps to recreate the problem if possible.

  • Copy of the complete error message if pheasible, otherwise include the full error message as an attachment.

  • If the problem involves installation, send the entire configure.log and make.log as attachments.

    • configure.log can be found either at $PETSC_DIR/configure.log, $PETSC_DIR/configure.log.bkp (which holds the second-most recent configure.log), or in $PETSC_DIR/$PETSC_ARCH/lib/petsc/conf/configure.log[.bkp].

    • make.log can be found in the same places as listed above, however note that there is no make.log.bkp so be sure to not overwrite your make.log with additional build attempts.

  • Machine type: (e.g. HPC, laptop, etc.)

  • OS Version and Type: (run uname -a to get the version number)

  • PETSc Version: (run PETSc program with -version, or look in $PETSC_DIR/include/petscversion.h)

  • MPI implementation: (e.g. MPICH, LAM, IBM, SGI)

  • Compiler and version: (e.g. Gnu C, Gnu g++, native C)

  • Probable PETSc component: (e.g. Mat, Vec, DM, KSP, etc.)

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