Questions and Bug Reports

• report bugs,
• ask for clarification,
• ask for help in tracking down bugs, and
• request new features within PETSc.

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 following:

• patches,
• troubleshooting guide, and
• FAQ

to determine whether a fix or work-around to the problem already exists. Also, see the chapter "Hints for 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:

• If the problem involves installation, send the entire log file from running make.
• Machine type: (e.g., sun4)
• OS Version: (run uname -a to get the version number)
• PETSc Version: (run PETSc program with -v, or look in include/petscversion.h)
• MPI implementation: (e.g., MPICH, LAM, IBM, SGI)
• Compiler: (e.g., Gnu C, Gnu g++, native C)
• Probable PETSc component: (for example, Mat, Vec, Draw, KSP, etc.)
• Problem description: Also, please cut and paste error messages from the compiler, program, etc.

Tracking Down Problems

If you report a bug or problem 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 Windows 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.