Conference call notes 20160831

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

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (7):

• Damian Alvarez (JSC, Germany)
• Pablo Escobar (sciCORE/UniBas, Switzerland)
• Fotis Georgatos (Illumina, UK)
• Joachim Hein (Lunarc, Lund University, Sweden)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
• Alan O'Cais (JSC, Germany)
• Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)

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
  • https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/wiki/Deprecated-toolchains
• procedure: archiving easyconfigs + clear warning

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?

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:
  • Homebrew: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/issues/14989
  • Fedora: tkinter is split off in a separate package
• 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