Telcon: 2023 11 08

Wednesday November 8th, 9am PT (UTC -8:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Davide DelVento
• Mark Krentel
• Yang Liu
• Prithvi Thakur
• Brian Kyle
• Kevin Fotso
• Sreeram Venkat
• Brian Van Essen
• Cameron Smith RPI

Agenda

This meeting is for Q&A: there are no pre-planned general topics.

• Davide: installed Julia with Spack
  • Extendable packages, some require pre-compilation
  • The default precompilation directory is based on where it was built
  • Users installing extensions with Julia are automatically using this directory
    • (Side note, this directory is based on the username and in /tmp/, but the directory is removed after installation, which allows another user to create a dir with the original name but owned by then)
  • Ideally all users could have a different path they do builds in
    • (so changing the path at build time would not be useful)
• Yang: want to make external package module the default
  • Had preferences for ncurses [6.2, 6.4], concretization
  • Was getting 6.4
  • spack spec -U got 6.2
  • Using system nano with spack ncurses causes problem
• Sreeram: spack info petsc doesn't show amgx
  • Looks like it wasn't added yet
  • Installing amgx has an issue
  • Resolved by pulling newer version (2.4)
• Brian (VE): is there ever a reason for python to have a runtime dependency on py-setuptools
  • Peter: sometimes, but not all cases of declared dependencies assign the correct deptypes
  • Generating modules
  • Within a DAG, spack builds multiple py-setuptools
• Brian (K):
  • Error building r-studio
  • Looks like there's a conflict in r-studio asking for a conflicted version of qt
    • The dependency is defined at https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/4ac0e511ad6dee9f9941689e063b08fc511daa5a/var/spack/repos/builtin/packages/rstudio/package.py#L26C34-L26C34
    • The PR that added the conflict is https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/33898
    • The conflict is defined in qt at https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/b0355d6cc02bf06c3d15939fb1508ac5dffb7fc9/var/spack/repos/builtin/packages/qt/package.py#L233
  • ? how can I use a system install of rstudio?
    • Peter: use an external
    • https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build_settings.html#external-packages
    • You'll want to use buildable: false
• Kevin Fotso:
  • libbsd/expat issue
  • The libbsd.so file generated by Spack is ASCII (at least as provided by file)
  • In the meantime, possibly use an external libbsd
  • Kevin: also tried symlinking libbsd.so to the actual lib