Telcon: 2018 01 18

Attendees

• Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
• Patrick Gartung (Fermi)
• Greg Becker (LLNL)
• Peter Scheibel (LLNL)
• Mario (NERSC)

Roadmap

• Spack v0.11.0 is out

  • This is the version we used for SC17, with one bugfix for a binary packaging issue.
  • We're going to try to do monthly releases regardless of what is done, so that people can better track the repo.

• Focus areas (at least at LLNL) in the near future are:

  • SAT-based Concretizer (Todd finally has time to work on this -- babies take time!)
  • Environments support (Kitware is helping us with this one)
  • Testing and binary distribution

• Focus areas above are funded and have programmatic milestones with LLNL, so the deadline for getting them done is September of this year.

  • We'd like to roll things out earlier (environments probably first) so stay tuned.

News

• Upcoming Spack events:
  • Todd is giving some talks at FOSDEM 2018 (Feb 3-4):
    • Talk on binary distribution plans: HPC Devroom
    • Talk on compilers and dependency management lessons learned: Package Management Devroom -- covers some things we're trying to address with the new concretizer
  • We'll be at the ECP annual meeting in Knoxville after that (Feb 5-8)
    • There will be a Spack tutorial (Feb 7, 1:30-5pm)
    • There will be a Spack "state of the union" meeting (Feb 8, 3:30-5pm) to get a feel from ECP teams and facilities what their needs are.
    • Note that Spack is in the US ECP, and it gets us lots of collaborations and connections to DOE facilities, but the project is larger than that, and work on Spack doesn't depend on whether ECP is funded or not.

Issues

• Travis has been having outages

  • Mac builders are disabled: https://twitter.com/traviscistatus/status/954001604218257408
  • We're moving mac builders out of the usual workflow and only run them once a day on a cron job
  • More details in issue 6928
  • thanks to Massimiliano for tracking all this

• Update on the coverage issues of last week

  • Whole story in 6887
  • We fixed a bug in one of the tool we use
  • Now it's possible to safely restart using concurrency options (see 6949)
  • It remains to be understood though why we have 2-3 malformed .coverage* reports almost every time we run unit tests

• We recently fixed some issues with doc builds failing

  • [Package List] on spack.readthedocs.io was generated as RST by spack list --format=rst.
  • Sphinx takes forever to handle 2300+ packages so ReadTheDocs kills the job (only allows 15 min)
  • spack list --format=html generates the list as straight HTML now.
  • Would like to have something like https://formulae.brew.sh instead -- where packages are just searchable and maybe indexed by tags.

Recent PRs of interest

Discussion