Telcon: 2017 01 08

Participants

1. Todd Gamblin (LLNL)

News

1. As usual, check the pulse

2. Down to last few issues for Spack v0.10 release

• Todd is vowing to have v0.10 out by next week.

1. Major point of discussion: what to do about Java and other EULA-requiring packages. Discussion in #1298 and #2621

• Spack currently auto-accepts the license in the jdk package

• Homebrew does this as well

  • put in an issue to homebrew-cask -- neither tool should be doing this and they don't have any special deals with Oracle.

• Debian and Gentoo have mechanisms for silently accepting certain types of licenses.

  • Key is that the user makes the decision to accept these licenses.

• Todd discussed this with LLNL management and they recommend a system as follows:

  1. Close #1298 and postpone solution to 1.0 (Feb)
  2. For 1.0, implement a licenses.yaml file with license preferences similar to Gentoo's
  • This would be coarse-grained -- packages are either:
    • free (default, includes most OSI licenses)
    • EULA (requires a specific entry in licenses.yaml to accept).
  3. EULA Packages would contain a URL or some pointer to the license, and users would need to say "accept" interactively on install if they accept the license.
  4. Also add a spack license command that would allow easy adding of settings to the file, e.g., notionally:

  spack license accept --always jdk@:1.8
  

  You could use regular old specs to restrict the version on what you accept.

• Thoughts?

1. Some work on 1.0 has also started:
2. Spack now has a CDash site at spack.io/cdash - We will be using this to test the 1.0 release - Todd is currently hosting this site himself. We will move it to LLNL infrastructure once public cloud web hosting in AWS is approved. - Kiel Friedt at LLNL is working on a YAML format to specify combinatorial tests to Spack. - See #2014 and #2445
3. Spack has a domain at spack.io - Put up a simple Jekyll splash page there with pointers to the rest of the project. - cf. brew.sh and linuxbrew.sh

Mostly-1.0 Stuff

1. Integration with other package mangers. (#2750)

2. Mine other repos to auto-generate and auto-maintain packages AND THEIR DEPENDENCIES. [speculative]

3. Flexible Spack Environments for Development

   1. Override config with custom scopes (#2686)
      • OS-specific settings in /packages.yaml Eg: buildable=False stuff
      • Project-specific settings in /packages.yaml Eg: Specific versions, some variants, etc.
      • Sub-project settings in /packages.yaml
      • Develop-mode settings in develop/packages.yaml Eg: Turn versions to develop, turn on +debug variants
   2. "Bundle" (Dummy) packages: no PR yet
   3. Integrated creation of enviornment scripts (#2698)
   4. spack setup that generates multiple spconfig.py files at a time (#2662)

4. Bugs found when merging configurations (#2694) ---> More thought needs to go into HOW to merge variant lists

5. Command line defaults (just make life easier) (#2705)

6. Global Variant: shared vs. static (#2692) Intended use: set for all of Spack in packages.yaml (#2644) No way to mix shared & static within one concretization --> Are we OK with this (requires #2386 first)

7. Many pending documentation needs

   1. Especially CMakePackage/AutotoolsPackage/PythonPackage

8. Other variant standardizations:

   1. +doc (not +docs)
   2. Lower case (esp. +x)
   3. Underscores, no dashes (at least for forseeable future)

9. type=nolink

   1. Agreed to deprecate in favor of type=('build', 'run')

Discussion