Conference call notes 20150317

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Notes on the 27th EasyBuild conference call, Tuesday March 17th 2015 (2.00pm - 2.30pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (5):

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

Agenda

• outlook to EasyBuild v2.1
• discussion of ideas for new features
• open floor for questions/problems

Notes

EasyBuild v2.1 outlook

• strict deadline: end of April (before EasyBuild hackathon @ CSC.fi)
• Cray support should/must be included by then
  • different components:
    • support for listed 'system modules' as dependencies (PR coming up by Petar)
    • definitions of Cray toolchains
    • script to generate easyconfigs for Cray toolchains, so modules can be installed for them
• other features will be merged in as they are ready (cfr. https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/issues/100)
  • support for module files in Lua syntax is very close to being ready (https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1060)
    • opens up possibilities to further enhance synergy with Lmod
    • also supporting properties and families will be looked into later (EB 2.2?)
  • support for --review-pr is close to being finished (https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1142)
  • deprecating log.error in favour of raise EasyBuildError is likely to go in (https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1218)
  • getting support for GC3Pie backend for --job ready is being looked into, unclear whether that will be fully stable by EB v2.1 (https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1008)

Support for --hide-deps (Pablo)

• certainly interesting for JSC as well to avoid accidental installations of non-hidden zlib
• better option than adding support for hidden = True in easyconfigs, so that would also require listing that dependency via hiddendependencies in other easyconfigs

Docker test setup

• Robert: Docker setup for automated testing PRs * focused on foss toolchains for now * packaging support would help to avoid rebuilding everything from scratch (seed toolchain build via RPMs) * also interested to look into pulling in required easyblock PRs
  • just looking for easyblocks PR URL in easyconfig PR description is probably sufficient

Other topics

• interesting future avenue: Nix (http://nixos.org) as a way to set up a build environment for EB
• messed up permissions, e.g. blist is not world-readable (Eric)
  • will open issue to collect more details and look into a fix
  • use adjust_permissions in post_install_step to make sure everything is world-readable?
• Robert has been working on adding packaging support (cfr. https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1170)
  • new PR will be opened to proceed with that and have an easy way to discuss/test/give feedback
  • see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1224