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Telcon: 2022 12 07

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Massimiliano Culpo edited this page Dec 7, 2022 · 12 revisions

Held Wednesday December 7th, 9am PT

Attendees

  • Massimiliano Culpo (host)
  • Mark Krentel
  • Phil Regier
  • Ivan Razumov
  • Dom Heinzeller
  • Phil Sakievich
  • Robert Underwood

Agenda

(This will be just Q&A - there are no pre-planned general Spack discussion items)

  • Mark There are a few widely used projects which, on a few platforms, fail to build because of time-stamp related issues. How should we tackle this recurring problem?

    • Mark: What usually happens is that some *.texi file is understood by the configuration as to be regenerated, and the build fail when looking for texinfo, since it is not listed as a build dependency.
    • Related PRs:
    • Mark: These packages are release tarball and they shouldn't need any rebuild of docs
    • Mark: One solution is to add a build dependency on makeinfo, but this brings a lot of dependencies into fundamental packages that don't really need them
    • Massimiliano: Can we either patch the configuration mechanism, or trick it that all is fine with respect to makeinfo?
    • Mark: It's worth investigating that. Issue is possibly reproducible on Summit.

  • Ivan It's difficult to get a sense of what would change when a huge environment is reconcretized after some small modifications

    • Ivan: Why don't we add a feature to limit the solver to use only certain packages prescribed by the user ?
    • Massimiliano: I think a better solution would be to have some command that lets users inspect differences on speculative concretizations, with respect to a previous state
    • Massimiliano: Harmen did some work to print spec differences in a readable way on screen

  • Ivan Sometimes I want to use a commit sha to indicate a version for a local tarball I made from that commit, but Spack understands that as a GitVersion instead of a normal Version.

    • Massimiliano: I think Spack understands that as GitVersion only if they are 40 chars. If you limit the version tag to something less it will be understood as a normal Version.

  • Ivan Why can't we use a version non existing in the package.py when we adopt the @<git-ref>=<version> syntax on the rhs ?

    • Massimiliano: I think the rhs is used to determine how to build that git-ref, so it must be known to Spack
    • Ivan: The use case is a custom build-system that needs to use different versions for different git-ref
    • Greg (offline): We should be able to use an unknown version, as long as it compares properly to the other versions

  • Dom I noted a few issues with buildcaches on macOS, and submitted a PR to fix them if anybody could review it

  • Dom Proposed to change --source to true by default

    • Phil S., Robert, Mark: Many people might disagree with the additional space required for installation
    • Dom: The issue is with CI, and with some additional work that is required to upstream changes from our fork that is tested with --source
    • Dom: An alternative solution that works for us is to make that configurable from file.

  • Robert Is there a way to get information from Spack public mirrors?

  • Robert Can we update the images we use in pipelines (CentOS in particular) to get more recent compilers?

    • Massimiliano: I think we can. We should probably get in touch with Luke for the e4s pipelines.
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