is there a need for PETSc packages specific to the patch version (3.7.7 rather than 3.7) ?

[Drew Parsons <dparsons@debian.org>]

Hi all, I'm anticipating making a change to the petsc packaging but
wanted to ask if there is anyone who prefers the current patch-specific 
packaging.

The default build of petsc installs into a patch specific location,
meaning that 3.7.7 can be installed parallel to 3.7.6.  I organised the
petsc packaging to match this practice, allowing coinstallation of
different patch versions if desired.  My reasoning was that if upstream
installs this way by default, then we should conform to that patch-
specific approach.

But within a given minor version (3.7 here), the patch versions are ABI
compatible with same sonames (libpetsc.so.3.7). So we could override
the default installation to provide just one installation in a 3.7
subdir rather than 3.7.z.

In fact the petsc4py author advises me that he thinks it's overthinking
it to provide coinstallable patch versions. He recommends providing
just a single petsc 3.Y package.

So with petsc 3.8 now released, I expect to drop the erstwhile patch-
specific libpetsc3.8.0-dev / libpetsc3.8.0 packages in favour of a
single libpetsc3.8-dev / libpetsc3.8 package.

But first I want to give people a chance to speak up in case they can
see any benefit in continuing to provide coinstallable patch-specific
versions of PETSc.

So speak up if you'd like to keep the petsc packaging the way it is for
PETSc 3.7.z :)

Drew