Conference call notes 20140218

Notes on the 7th EasyBuild conference call, Tuesday Feb. 18th 2014 (3pm -3.30pm CET)

Alphabetical list of attendees (2):

~~update on support for easyconfig format v2 (Kenneth)~~ skipped
tips & best practices for dealing with errors in a non-trivial build process (question by Geert Jan)

dive into the (debug) build log
start from the end, look for run_cmd entries or Running method * part of step * and any error messages that occur in the corresponding output
we should look into splitting the log into separate log files, one per step, to make debugging problems significantly easier
having a devel log level, i.e. one level more verbose than debug, might be useful too; this can help in making debug logs more readable, by avoiding lots of output that was only relevant when developing new features (e.g. toolchain processing, setting up the environment, etc.)
setting up an environment like the one in which EasyBuild operates
stopping after a particular step with -s or --stop is a first (small) step
to set up the actual environment, the devel modules should be used (but they're not usable yet/anymore in current releases, cfr. https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/109)
we should generate separate devel modules per step, in the build directory (see also https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/217)
side question: uninstall command line option (cfr. https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/590)
uninstalling software can be easily done naively by removing the install directory and the corresponding module
this doesn't take into account dependencies though; the software being removed may be a dependency to others
for this, reverse dependency tracking needs to be implemented

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