Telcon: 2022 09 07

(held September 7th 2022)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Mark Krentel
• Davide DelVento
• Greg Becker
• Richarda Butler
• Robert Underwood
• Wyatt

Agenda items

• (Mark) have a package where some versions are binaries and newer ones are source-based
  • For now, you can use when= to change the behavior of the install() method before/after versions
  • PR to improve support for multi-build system packages at https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/30738 (before SC)
• (Davide) duplicating environments
  • Cloning spack.lock works
  • There are many environments to clone, so there is a desire to streamline this
  • spack location -e... might help with writing a script
• (Davide) comparing arbitrary specs
  • This can be done with two spec.yaml files or spec.json files
  • `spack location -i <package>`/.spack/spec.json
  • How to compare two environments?
    • Want to know about all specs that differ between the environments
  • Possibly useful: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/28885
  • Issue: https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/31782
• (Brian) Spack support for Cray libraries
  • spack external read-cray-manifest doesn't output anything when it succeeds
  • If you want to get rid of such packages you can run spack uninstall --origin=external-db
    • Note: this isn't documented well

Possible Agenda items

• (Davide) Desire to duplicate an installation
  • Does overwrite of spack.lock/spack.yaml work?
  • You can also "version" the environment: copy the lock/yaml to a new environment in the production environment (then, if users have no issues with the new environment, remove the old environment)
  • If the user exposes the packages in the environment with modules, do we need per-environment modules?
    • (Davide) In my case I version-control the modules so this isn't an issue
• (Davide) what about major version updates?
  • Do users pull major updates to their installations? How big a leap do people do in general? And how often?
  • (Peter) we may have a poll on this, but otherwise it would be interesting to conduct one
• (Chris) Options for spack style checking of user package repos (see https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/31938).
• (Brian) Sanitizing repo, getting rid of improperly-concretized packages (i.e. how do I get rid of old stuff I don't use now)
  • (in particular reuse)
• (Mark) Ping on #27247
• (Matt) Package reuse is nice, but how can we refresh a single package?
  • E.g. want to use the newest version of spectrum-mpi
• (Matt) How does spack deprecate handle refreshing module files for packages that depend on a deprecated spec in an lmod hierarchy?
  • e.g. if you deprecate the old MPI, does the lmod refresh use the newer MPI in the hierarchy
• (Massimiliano) Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-06-08: multiple build systems used by one package
• (Matt) if we build an environment, and one package fails, then module files are not generated
  • Want spack module refresh but only to generate module files that haven't been generated yet
• Updating compiler wrapper to strip -Werror (optionally): https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/30284
• (Wileam) Adding fpm as a build system
  • Issue on fpm repo: https://github.com/fortran-lang/fpm/issues/79
• Default action for concretization in environments: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/29942#issuecomment-1097287194
• Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-04-06: warning() directive
• (Wileam) Can externals detection be expanded from executables only to arbitrary files (e.g. header or .a/.so library files)?
  • For llvm@13 and @14 with +gold, see issue comment and PR https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/30954
  • BLAS detection is also affected, see https://spackpm.slack.com/archives/C5W7NKZJT/p1659734369147249
• Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-04-13: not in spec syntax
• (Phil) Issues with SSL signature authentication at SNL, see https://spackpm.slack.com/archives/G7XED8NAD/p1660009273764719