Telcon: 2020 03 26

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Patrick Gartung
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Chris Green

Agenda

• (1-1:30pm) Creating a test package for testing binary caches
  • (Patrick) Make an install tarball: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/15687
    • 3 packages, all CMake
    • Works on Desktop (Ubuntu Xenial)
    • On Travis it isn't working
      • See: https://travis-ci.org/github/spack/spack/jobs/667416191?utm_medium=notification&utm_source=github_status
    • The tests need to check installing to different directory layouts
      • Instantiating the directory layout may need some work
    • The tests in this PR require pre-made binaries
      • Since the input packages for the tests use CMake, this is required to avoid building CMake
      • We don't need packages that use CMake to exercise binary caching
    • These test packages don't contain compiled-in strings
    • The mock packages refer to actual packages on Github: e.g. https://github.com/gartung/garply/blob/master/garply/garply.cc
  • What challenges exist now/what do the tests need to check
    • Relocation of RPATHs
    • patchelf is used, how to mock it?
    • (Not a big deal) debug symbols referring to source
    • TCL: this package compiles paths into the binary
    • perl: the relocation logic padded with null bytes, perl checks for this and fails
  • (Massimiliano) how much can you cover with packages which compile just using GCC?
  • (Massimiliano) some tests in relocate.py use "requires" to indicate e.g. that some packages need patchelf
• Spack 0.14.1 was released on March 20: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spack/pbRCureS0XY
• Recently-merged PRs of general interest
  • The 0.14.1 announcement includes several recent updates and bug fixes to Spack
  • (Todd) you can now run spack test when Spack is running with a Python instance that was built by Spack: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/15612
    • Previously this required also doing spack install py-setuptools and adding that to Python (e.g. with a view)
  • (Kai Germaschewski) fix upstreams using new distributed build logic: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/15526
  • Add a --skip-unstable-versions option to the spack mirror command, which skips adding packages that do not have a stable checksum available on the internet: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/15100
  • (Michael Kuhn) Packages in Spack can now define a fetch_options class-level variable, this is a dictionary which e.g. can set 'timeout' for packages that are retrieved from websites with slower connections: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/15317