Telcon: 2016 02 11

Participants

Includes concretization preferences
Includes ability to specify prefixes for external packages.
Left to do:
- Polish aspects of package comparison code (refactor __cmp__ on spec.py)
- Refactor packages.yaml preference file to multiple files
  - OpenHPC interested in including one .yaml w/each RPM to expose OHPC packages to Spack.
After this is fixed, we can easily add support for #311
- Logic for sanely selecting an external to use is very similar to what is needed to pick a good already-installed package.
TODO: need to update the documentation for this a bit (config file format)

Lots of requests for this (EPFL, NASA, LLNL, others)
Inclusion of more environment variables from packages
- refactor setup_dependent_environment and combine with module vars.
  - loading module and setup_dependent_environment replacement should be equivalent.
  - Will probably add a hook of some sort to package:
```
```python
    def setup_module(self, module):
        module.prepend_path('PATH', <value>)
        module.set_path('QTDIR', <value>)
        # ... etc ...
```
```
Making module file names customizable per site.
Hierarchical modules
- provide a syntax to generate a hierarchical tree of modules.

Greg Becker and Mario Melara working on this
Will allow testing for, e.g., darwin (platform), rhel7 (os), mic/haswell/etc. (target)

Bug fixed: spack edit -f was failing.
Bug found: spack compilers doesn't work properly by default on a fresh clone in develop.
- Fixing very soon (has been frustrating for users)
Intel compiler issues discussed on the mailing list by Michael Galloway and Florent Pruvost.

Looks like we have some users at Fermilab
Update from Joe Ciurej on usage in PMESH
- Joe has been using Spack for a while
- has worked well so far
- willing to help with some of the issues on Github and the mailing list:
  - "local-only" packages (private, licensed stuff, things that require license forms)
  - Global variants would be useful (for Massimiliano (EPFL), Florent (INRIA), Joe, others)
Nu Ai
- was starting to use Spack, getting back to it
Update from NERSC from Mario
- NERSC is holding off on getting more consultants involved until Cray PR is merged
- Mario working full time for now.
Mike Collette
- Happy with current version of Spack
- Had to switch from PGI to Intel on Cielo
  - Spack made this very easy, got around bug in PGI compiler
- Worried a little about upgrading to latest dev

customization for post-install hooks (module file name, custom environment variables, etc. )
Common interface for packages providing the same virtual service (in some sense this generalizes #234.
- Would like e.g. mpi providers to have a '_compiler_wrapper' property that could be queried)
Support for external packages
Installations out of spack source tree
Longer term: also interested in a consistent way to forward variants, but I guess for that we should wait until the Cray and the custom compiler flags branches will be merged.

1 and 3 are soon to be done above, 4 is related to TOSS packaging.
2 and 5 are not on the nearest-term list but would greatly improve packaging some parts of the stack.