MaPS - MaRDI Packaging System

Introduction

MaPS, short for MaRDI Packaging System is the working name for the software system created by TA1 Computer Algebra for Measure 1.4 Predefined software environments. MaPS provides a unified interface both, to package a software inside a functional environment (called a runtime), and to "install" a published runtime onto a computer system in a user friendly way, while still keeping it separate from the computer's host environment.

WiKi

Have a look at the wiki, located at https://github.com/aaruni96/maps/wiki

Bubblewrap

We currently depend on a patched version of bubblewrap to avoid minor problem in how SIGINT is handled. Until the fix (or equivalent) is bundled into release, we need to clone and compile https://github.com/aaruni96/bubblewrap/tree/ak/sigint . maps will automatically try to do this for you, but you must ensure you have the devtools installed to compile bwrap.

Installing

We have ambitions of packaing maps in apt/dnf/aur/whatever. In the meantime, it must be cloned from git, and run as a python script, ideally within a venv. Check the installation instructions on the wiki.

Usage

NOTE: MaPS recently had a UI overhaul, making it nicer to use. Please refer to the NEW help messages and documentation to use the system.

Installing Runtimes

Installing and running a runtime is a simple case of providing the unique identifier of the runtime to maps.

# specifying the keyword `runtime` is optional
# if no other keyword is specified, it is assumed that one wishes to
# use the runtime mode (as it is the most common use of MaPS)
maps runtime --deploy me.myname.myapplication/sysarch/version
maps --run me.myname.myapplication/sysarch/version

Packaging Runtimes

In this mode, the user can commit arbitrary trees into an ostree repo, and then (sometime in the future) publish them. The trees contain everything required by the application to run, as the resulting package will be run inside a user namespace sandbox. The packager is responsible for providing a correct tree, although, we provide a "default" tree (based on the debian docker image) to begin with.

# Initialise a new tree from a minimal debian base
maps package --initialize /path/to/new/tree

# Start a bash session inside a sandbox
maps package --sandbox /path/to/new/tree

# Commit the tree into ostree repository
maps package --commit /path/to/new/tree me.myname.myapplication/sysarch/version

Known Problems

• The OSTree Repository cannot be initialized onto a filesystem without extended attributes, in particular, NFS does not work. As a workaround, you can set the environment variables XDG_DATA_HOME (system OSTree Repository) and HOME (Runtime checkout) to point to some directory on a filesystem which has support for extended attributes.
• There is currently a bug in fuse-overlayfs, which causes problems in copying a read-only file. In concrete terms, this means that julia testing infrastructure fails at the time of writing. This needs to be either patched in upstream, or worked around by maps. Upstream bubblewrap is integrating overlayfs directly. Once Add --overlay and related options is merged, we expect this problem to be resolved.
• Only Linux is supported directly. MacOS and Windows users are recommended to virtualize Linux in their respective environments. More information about this is in the Wiki.

Contributing

Style Practices

All code must conform to these settings of pylint and flake8 (enforced by CI):

pylint -d C0413,C0103,R0912,R0915,W0603 src/maps.py
flake8 --max-line-length 100 --ignore=E402 src/maps.py