Conference call notes 20150106

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Notes on the 23rd EasyBuild conference call, Tuesday January 6th 2015 (3.00pm - 3.30pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

• Andy Georges (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Eric Gregory (JSC, Germany)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Robert Schmidt (OHRI, Canada)

Agenda

• outlook to EasyBuild v2.0 (Kenneth)
• overview of major upcoming features (Kenneth)

Notes

Outlook to EasyBuild v2.0

• mainly dropping support for deprecated behaviour (and bumping the version)
  • see http://easybuild.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Deprecated-functionality.html
  • eb --fix-deprecated-stuff cmdline option?
• no new features in EasyBuild framework planned, probably only in EB v2.1 and later
• hopefully getting a significant amount of easyblock/easyconfig PRs merged in

Overview of major upcoming features

• only generating module files (skipping actual build/installation), with sanity check optionally retained
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1018
• support for resolving dependencies via subtoolchains (+ dummy) [Markus/Alan/Eric @ Basel hackathon?]
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/741
• support for generating module files in Lua syntax
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1060
• support for module families (Tcl & Lua, Lmod-only)
• support for module properties (Tcl & Lua, Lmod-only)
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/981
• support for installing dependencies with minimal required subtoolchain
• easyconfig format v2 (+ enhanced eb cmdline)
• specifying module names to install on EB command line
• support for non-strict version specifications for dependencies
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/746
• support for --avail-toolchainopts
• support for --dump-toolchain-env
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1091
• support for --pr-review
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1005
• better support for --job [Ricardo @ Basel hackathon?]
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1008
• support for downloading from SVN/git repository [Jens @ Basel hackathon?]
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1082
• support for easily overriding easyconfig parameters via cmdline/environment
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/712
• support for generating packages (via FPM?)
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/200
• support for uninstalling software (requires reverse dependency tracking)
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/590
• support for rpath
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/651
• toolchain-neutral installations
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/570
• fix devel modules, create them after each build step
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/109

notes:

• overview of features we have in mind for the coming weeks/months
  • no guarantees w.r.t. when they will be worked on!
• of particular interest to HPC-UGent:
  • support for only (re)generating module file, potentially under a different module naming scheme and for existing installations
  • support for module files in Lua syntax and module families/properties
• of particular interest to JSC:
  • support for resolving dependencies via subtoolchains & installing dependencies with minimal required toolchain

Other topics

• issue with binutils build with OS-provided zlib and modules loaded that have another zlib as a dependency (Eric)
  • binutils tools issue a warning due to zlib version mismatch
  • two possible solutions:
    • statically link (OS-provided) zlib into binutils
    • avoid installing a zlib module with eb using --filter-deps=zlib configure option
• (Perl) script(s) to determine reverse dependencies for EB-installed software (Eric), used for:
  • picking versions of common dependencies (e.g. zlib, Python, ...) and avoid too many different versions of common dependencies
  • determining impact of removing a particular module (that may be used as a dependency for others)
  • determining which toolchain module to use based on what module spider specifies
    • Lmod is unaware of toolchains, and thus specifies individual toolchain components to load rather than a single toolchain module