Conference call notes 20150826

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Notes on the 35th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday August 26th 2015 (5.00pm - 5.30pm CET)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (6):

• Petar Forai (IMP/IMBA, Austria)
• Fotis Georgatos (freelancer)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Ward Poelmans (UGent, Belgium)
• Adam HUffman
• Robert Schmidt (OHRI, Canada)

Agenda

• outlook to EasyBuild v2.3.0 (Kenneth)
• top features wish list
• revive work on support for 'fat' easyconfigs

top features wishlist & 'fat' easyconfigs

• bioinformatics easyconfigs PRs (Fotis)
  • => plan another easyconfigs merge sprint?
• support for families/properties (Petar)
• alternate easyconfig format (Robert)
  • reduce overhead + amount of copy-pasted code required
  • YAML-based looks like a good approach
    • rich/simply syntax, good Python integration (PyYAML)
  • rough example by Robert of what this may look like @ https://gist.github.com/rjeschmi/378761f0dc71bbcf70aa
  • student intern (1 day/week) may be able to help make progress on this
• Cray support (Kenneth)
  • important to getting traction at larger HPC sites (CSCS, JSC, TACC, NCSA, ...)
  • Kenneth will try and score a meeting with Cray at SC15, via contacts at CSCS, TACC, CSC.fi, ...
• Python 3 (?, Kenneth)
  • seems non-critical now
  • dependencies (e.g., option parser, logger) need to be Python 3 compatible first
  • Fedora 23 will have Python 3 as a default (Ward)
• support for RPATH linking (Kenneth)

Other

• let Software Sustainability Institute review EasyBuild code base (Fotis)
  • lots of issues we are aware of, but effort is focused on features
  • code review and test-driven development are a good start
  • more Python features like named tuples and context managers could/should be taken into use