Bug Reporting in PETSc 2.0
The PETSc maintenance e-mail is intended for users to report bugs, ask for clarification, ask for help in tracking down bugs, and request new features within PETSc. Please send all such mail to petsc-maint@mcs.anl.gov (not to the individual PETSc authors). You will get a faster response from petsc-maint because all reports are immediately routed to all appropriate PETSc authors.
Before sending a bug report, please consult the following:
troubleshooting, and
to determine whether a fix or work-around to the problem already exists. Also, see the chapter "Performance" 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:
Tracking Down Problems
If you report a bug or problem installing and we are unable to figure out the problem by email, we may be able to offer remote help via Microsoft's Netmeeting Software. For this service you must have access to a PC running Windows95 or Windows NT and have installed the free Netmeeting software. If the problem involves a Unix system, you must be able to telnet or rlogin into the Unix machine from the Windows machine. If the problem involves the PETSc graphics, you must be running a X-server on the PC such as Exceed or X-win.
Netmeeting allows us to remotely run commands on your machine as you watch. Usually, due to our complete knowledge of PETSc and experience with many different machine architectures, we can track down many problems quickly. We can provide help only based on our availability; we may not have time to provide this service, and we can only try this after several iterations of email have failed to track down the problem.