Geometric point merging has an inherent chance of failure that occurs
when a mesh contains valid distinct points that are closer together than
the supplied tolerance. It is beneficial to avoid such merging whenever
possible.
reconstructParMesh does not need explicit point merging any more. Points
may be duplicated temporarily when processor meshes are combined which
share points and edges but not faces. Ultimately, however,
reconstructParMesh reconstructs the entire mesh so everything eventually
gets face-connected and all point duplications get resolved.
fvMeshDistribute requires point-merging, as the entire mesh is not
constructed. However, since 5d4c8f5d, this process has been purely
topological and has not relied on any of the geometric merging processes
triggered by utilised code.
As such, all geometric point merging operations and tolerances have been
removed from these two implementations, as well as in lower level code
in faceCoupleInfo and polyMeshAdder. faceCoupleInfo has also had support
for face and edge splits removed as this was not being used. This change
will have improved the robustness of both reconstruction and
redistributuon and has greatly reduced the total amount of code
involved.
The only geometric tolerance-based matching still being performed by
either of these processes is as a result of coupled patch ordering in
fvMeshDistribute. It is possible that this is not necessary either
(though at present coupled patch ordering is certainly needed
elsewhere). This warrants further investigation.