PETSc folks seem to have a better maintained fork

[jaimergp]

Just learnt about https://bitbucket.org/petsc/pkg-metis/, built at https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/blob/main/config/BuildSystem/config/packages/metis.py. Might be a better option than keeping up-to-date with upstream issues? At least we can carry the patches?

• This was referred in one of the external links of Large 2000x peformance regression from 5.1 to 5.2 KarypisLab/METIS#71 by Revert from GitHub METIS/ParMETIS distributions to PETSc forks awslabs/palace#170

[zklaus]

Petsc generally does a great job and I can believe that their fork would be easier to work with. However, there latest version seems to be 5.1.0-p11, so probably an improved version of upstream 5.1.0, likely not functionally equivalent to 5.2.1. Understanding the history is not easy mostly because the upstream github repo was only started with the initial commit in 2020, which is clearly an import from a different version control system that did not preserve timestamps, where the Petsc fork has version 5.1.0 in 2013.

[jaimergp]

Maybe it's a matter of keeping a 5.1.x branch around.