Conference call notes 20150303

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Notes on the 26th EasyBuild conference call, Tuesday March 3rd 2015 (3.00pm - 3.30pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

• Petar Forai (IMP/IMBA, Austria)
• Andy Georges (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Eric Gregory (JSC, Germany)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Ward Poelmans (UGent, Belgium)
• Robert Schmidt (OHRI, Canada)

Agenda

• EasyBuild v2.0 update
• early outlook to EasyBuild v2.1
• make eb consider robot search path when looking for easyconfigs specified on the command line
• dummy vs system toolchain

Notes

EasyBuild v2.0 update

• all planned changes in EasyBuild framework have been merged into develop
• a couple of documentation updates must be tackled before EasyBuild v2.0 can be released (major ones are already tackled)
• see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1000 for all details
• full regression test revealed only one major problem w.r.t. mpi_cmd_for function affecting several builds (HPCG, NAMD, NEURON, WRF (+ WPS))

Early outlook to EasyBuild v2.1

• preliminary target is before mid-April
• definitely before early May, so EasyBuild v2.1 is out for the hackathon in Finland (May 4-5 2015, Espoo)
• several major new features:
  • support for Lua module files (see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1060)
  • support for using GC3Pie as a backend for --job (see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1008)
  • support for updating Lmod caches (both user & system) (see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1177)
  • support for --review-pr (see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1142)
  • support for using EasyBuild on Cray (PRs by Petar are pending)
• one major change w.r.t. logging errors
  • deprecate use of log.error(...) (and log.exception)
  • use raise EasyBuildError(...) instead
  • see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1183
  • triggered by work on GC3Pie (https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1008)
• other potential features:
  • packaging support, using FPM (see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1170)
  • Robert is working on this, might be ready if good progress is made in the coming weeks
  • would be nice to support installing of FPM itself using EasyBuild

Consider robot search path when looking for easyconfigs specified on the command line

• see discussion on EasyBuild mailing list (https://lists.ugent.be/wws/arc/easybuild/2015-02/msg00039.html)
• no good reason why eb wouldn't consider robot search path for easyconfig files specified on cmdline
• conf call attendees agree it would be a sensible/good change to make that happen
• would be nice to get that included for EasyBuild v2.0

Dummy vs system toolchain

• dummy toolchain was never meant to be used directly, other than for (building and) installing compilers
• (build) dependencies are not loaded when version of dummy toolchain is non-empty (e.g. set to dummy)
• EasyBuild framework doesn't set up a proper build environment when a dummy toolchain is used
  • e.g. CC=dummy, no $CFLAGS defined, toolchainopts is ignored, etc.
• a proper system toolchain should be looked into
• system-gcc should be quite easy to do introduce, since good GCC support is already there
• see also https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/issues/1181