Telcon: 2016 12 08

Participants

1. Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
2. Tim Brown (NOAA)
3. Peter Scheibel (LLNL)
4. Mario Melara (NERSC)
5. Patrick Gartung (Fermilab)
6. Jim Amundson (Fermilab)
7. Benedikt Hegner (CERN)
8. Mike Collette (LLNL)
9. Cyrus Harrison (LLNL)

News

1. Spack v0.10

• Timeframe: end of December
• Hammering out last nasty hashing issues
• Moved exact version issues to subsequent release in order to get 0.10 out quickly.
• 46 major issues/PRs have been squashed/merged for this release
• Future releases will be finer grained.

1. Spack v1.0

• Timeframe: February
  • Will try to roll out solid releases more frequently
• Focus on package testing:
  • CERN has contributed CDash support for distributed reporting
    • Set up test Spack CDash site at CERN
    • each build modeled as a test suite with each node in the DAG as a test.
    • based on earlier work on JUnit output by Peter Scheibel
  • py.test support by Massimiliano has support for parametric fixtures -- will help with combinatorial testing
  • CDash is nice because many sites can contribute test results.
• Also focus on increasing test coverage with codecov
  • make PR merges more robust.
• Will likely move most of the nice to haves from v0.10 into 1.0 to get 0.10 out soon.
  • some large changes in concretization in here still need some work.
• feature list not certain yet, but will try for shorter list than v0.10, for speed.

1. Beyond 1.0

• Binary packages

  • Benedikt Hegner at CERN has experimented with GPG singing for his binary caching mechanism:
    • binary packages can be signed by a GPG key
    • signatures are checked at download if asked for
    • key management is left up to the user (and not wrapped inside spack)
    • the package database remembers who the signing party was -> in case of compromised keys there is some chance to see whether you may be affected.

• Would still like to sign package metadata file, e.g.

  archive-metadata:
              sha256: blahblah
              spec:
                  …etc…
  

Features/docs

1. Package repositories now documented

• known bug with interaction with packages.yaml

1. BG/Q support from pramodk merged
2. Many fixes from others.

Recent happenings

1. See Pulse for list of latest merges.