Conference call notes 20190724

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Notes on the 129th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday July 24th 2019 (17:00 - 18:00 CEST)

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (6):

• John Dey (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, USA)
• Fotis Georgatos (SDSC, Switzerland)
• Adam Huffman (Big Data Institute, Oxford)
• Mikael Öhman (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Davide Vanzo (Vanderbilt University, USA)
• Lars Viklund (Umeå University, Sweden)

Agenda

• Removing R and Perl version suffixes starting from 2019b toolchains
• 2019b toolchains
• Software naming conflicts (capitalization)
• Q&A

Removing R and Perl version suffixes starting from 2019b toolchains

• Davide: We have been doing it internally and we had no issues for now.
• John: For R and Perl it makes sense as long as we stick with a single version of interpreter for a toolchain.
• Lars: How about if we have builds of the same software, one "bare" and the other built with support for an interpreter?
• Mikael: How about packages that do not clearly indicate the interpreter in the name? For example in pkgconfig-1.5.1-GCCcore-8.2.0 we added "-python" version suffix to clarify it was a Python package unlike pkg-config.
• John: I like the idea of getting rid of version suffix except for edge cases.
  • Davide: Managing edge cases will require white listing in the Travis checks. It should not be too much of a hassle.
• Mikael: Nothing has a version suffix in the GCCcore-8.3.0 toolchain, so we could start with 2019b.

2019b toolchains

• Mikael: Are we going for 8.3.0 or 9.x for GCC?
  • Davide: It depends on which version of GCC is supported by the Intel compilers.
  • Fotis: Also consider DDT and TotalView support.
  • Davide: Moreover, jumping on a new version at early minor release could expose us to potential bugs. It would be better to wait at least 2020a for version 9.x.

Software naming conflicts (capitalization)

• Mikael: Groups that use all lowercase naming scheme will incur in module conflict when installing software which name differ only by capitalization (e.g. Salmon and SALMON).
• Fotis: Expect even more troubles because generated environment variables will have the same name.
• Mikael: We should add a Travis check to make sure we are not introducing naming conflicts.
• Davide: I'll open a PR to fix SALMON

Q&A

• Adam: Since bzip2 needs a sources URL update, is it ok to apply it retroactively to previous easyconfigs?
  • Davide: Yes, as long as we check that the checksums are consistent.