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Conference call notes 20160831

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Kenneth Hoste edited this page Aug 31, 2016 · 3 revisions

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Notes on the 58th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday August 31st 2016 (5pm - 6pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

  • Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
  • Pablo Escobar (sciCORE/UniBas, Switzerland)
  • Adam Huffman (Francis Crick Institute, UK)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
  • Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)

Agenda

  • discussion of proposal for deprecating old/inactive toolchains
  • X11 stack as a single module
  • Python without Tk/X11 dep
  • Q&A

Notes

Deprecating toolchains
  • discussion of proposal for deprecating old/inactive toolchains
  • which toolchains/versions + motivation
  • procedure: archiving easyconfigs + clear warning when archived easyconfigs are being used
  • Pablo: archived easyconfigs should still show up in output of eb --search (in a separate block?)
X11 stack as a single module
  • via 'components': https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/3440
  • via jhbuild: https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/3463
  • pros & cons for both approaches?
  • jhbuild takes a single datestamp as 'version', and pulls in straights from repos rather than using releases
  • jhbuild approach results in a bigger set of packages being installed (packages can be filtered out)
  • jhbuild approach may be easier to maintain since deps are taken of
  • jhbuild approach also includes Mesa & more...
  • Alan: open issues with jhbuild approach:
    • jhbuild approach requires two 'sources', but these a not versioned (e.g. xorg.modules)
    • problem with Mako Python modules required for Mesa not being found at build time, even though it's found at configure time...
      • can be worked around by including Python with Mako baked in as (build?) dep
  • Damian: dedicated (generic) easyblock for jhbuild approach
    • can also be used for BigDFT
  • current proposal:
    • go through with bundle-of-components approach for now
    • evaluate how hard that is to maintain in the future
    • also support jhbuild approach as drop-in alternative
    • switch to jhbuild approach if bundle-of-components is too much of a hassle w.r.t. maintaining it
Python without Tk/X11 dep
  • proposal by Ward to drop Tk from list of dependencies for Python by default
  • since it requires the whole X11 stack underneath...
  • cfr. other projects:
  • how much impact would this have, due to lack of Tkinter support in Python?
    • is providing a separate easyconfig for Python with Tk sufficient, or do we need something better?
    • would just require adding a separate dependency on Tkinter next to Python
Q&A
  • Damian: how to contribute back easyconfigs that were created with --minimal-toolchains enabled?
    • currently, tests would fail to resolve dependencies because of lack of --minimal-toolchains
    • enabling --minimal-toolchains in tests already is worth considering
    • plan is to enable --minimal-toolchains by default in EasyBuild v3.0.0
    • ... but people that disable it may suffer because dependency resolution may not work anymore when only trying to resolve dependencies with the 'parent' toolchain
    • Alan: big fat warning if robot fails to resolve deps when --minimal-toolchains is disabled, with pointer to documentation?
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