Telcon: 2023 02 01

Held Wednesday February 1st, 9am PT

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Justin Cook (NERSC)
• Mark Krentel
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Chris Green
• Sean Koyama
• Srinath Vadlamani
• Richarda Butler
• Greg Becker
• Todd Gamblin

Agenda

• Chris: have spack install --only=dependencies in an environment; want to not install any of the roots
  • In particular "root" here means the user specs in the environment
  • Note that is conceptually different from "roots" in an environment (but either way we don't currently have an option etc. for excluding multiple roots from the install)
  • Chris: furthermore, if one root depends on another root, I don't want either root to be installed (this may not work now)
  • Max: how would you do this in an environment which says the roots are hdf5 and zlib
    • For Chris' use case, it would be the intent of the user to install nothing
  • Tammy: Harmen has a PR which is working in the same area (i.e., spack install in environments): #35206
• Srinath: is there a document on the prototyping of compilers as dependencies
  • Massimiliano: not a formal document, but there are several issues
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/31359
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/31361
    • These are collected in https://github.com/orgs/spack/projects/3
    • Not all questions about syntax changes are fully answered at the moment
  • There is a project for tracking related issues
  • Separate build deps is also related, which Greg Becker is working on
  • Want to understand how the package syntax would change
    • Todd: most syntax should be consistent before and after
• Sean (ALCF): how are external modules handled at runtime?
  • Spack loads these modules at build time
  • When using spack load, the associated modules are not loaded
  • The generated module files also do not refer to it
  • We should update spack load to add an option to load the associated modules
  • Sean: of more interest is the generated env modules
    • Greg: both paths share logic which bundles these modifications
      • See: from_sourcing_file - this generates and EnvironmentModifications object
      • https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/lib/spack/spack/util/environment.py#L634-L707