Telcon: 2021 10 13

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel
• Mark Krentel
• Gregory Becker
• Kayla Butler
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Phil Sakievich
• Richard Henwood
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Srinath Vadlamani
• Nick Sly

Agenda

• (For next week) Mark Krentel: issues with Clingo concretization. In particular with virtuals.

  • Currently in slack, not github
  • Greg: virtual versions are not properly forwarded to provider versions

• Greg/Harmen: versions https://github.com/spack/spack/discussions/26557

  • Peter: what about foo<3 string conversion to foo@:2.999?
  • Greg: what about "foo@3.*"?
  • Harmen: what about foo@=3?

• Phil Sakievich: spack develop questions about direction

  • See also:
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/discussions/24966
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/26295#issuecomment-931277758
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/22087
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/25981

• Peter: when is the user scope necessary?

  • I've asserted we need it in some cases
  • For shared filesystems, it can be very annoying though, so I'd like to figure out if it could in fact be removed entirely
  • If using spack without an env, then there's a question of where to write config data to
    • ~ is an obvious choice
    • There is also a PR which introduces an install-tree scope, which would be owned by the user

• Tammy: should we build (and retain) the test dependencies at concretization/build time, especially if --test is used?

  • If not, there a potential issue with inconsistent test dependencies used to run tests at build time versus those used for stand-alone tests.
    • This has been observed with dependencies such as CMake (versions).
  • TBC next week
  • If you concretize at test time (vs. build time) then this depends on reuse in the concretizer

• Discussion: Packages which require multiple build systems: how to handle them?

  • Discussions on this:
    • (Proposal based on using a new directive) https://github.com/spack/seps/blob/8dafadb4cae08275d168af964b3d168b4248977f/seps/sep-0002.md
    • (Notes on trying an approach based on a when class decorator) https://github.com/spack/seps/issues/4
  • Two approaches were covered: Greg thought there were issues with both; we will cover that this week.

• Discussion: long environment activations - are you having an issue with this?

  • Some large envs might have this problem, e.g.: https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/25555

• Discussion: what does it mean to set a preferred variant in packages.yaml?

  • See discussion in issue https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/24754