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Telcon: 2022 03 02

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Tamara Dahlgren edited this page Mar 2, 2022 · 21 revisions

Attendees

  • Peter Scheibel (host)
  • Wileam Phan
  • Richarda Butler
  • Mark Krentel
  • Massimiliano Culpo
  • Phil Regier
  • Phil Sakievich
  • David M. Rogers
  • Tammy Dahlgren
  • Greg Becker

Agenda items

  • A spack update command
    • See https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/9134
    • The overall idea is that users can update their Spack instance but this generally takes several commands
      • If there is a common pattern, then spack update could replace several steps with just one call
      • The issue's initial description describes a simple common pattern but has a couple of side cases worth investigating:
        • If you are on the develop branch, pull the latest state
          • If you are on another branch, fail
          • Or... try merging from develop into the branch after pulling it?
    • (Wileam) There is also the possibility to add the spack upgrade command and make spack update and upgrade behave like apt
      • If you have existing changes stash and reapply them
        • If the reapply fails, then revert the fetch (i.e. return to the commit you were at before spack update
        • What if the reapply succeeds, but the resulting logic is broken? Should there be an undo?
    • From meeting:
      • (Wileam) Instead of pulling from develop head, can we pull the latest tag?
      • (David) When pulling latest state, there was an example of an installed package description being removed
        • In other words, the new package descriptions conflict with the old installations
      • (Phil) When working with Spack, push everything into an environment
        • This avoids conflicts with git pull (or rather, in this use case there isn't any difference between spack update and git pull)
        • Treat Spack prefix as "read-only"
      • (Max) Does this make more sense when the package recipes are separated from core Spack?
        • spack update could use the latest recipes
      • (Greg) Ideally Spack is easy to use even for folks not familiar with Python/Git
        • If a common use case is to "git stash; git pull; git unstash" then users unfamiliar with git would find this problematic
        • This applies for users modifying Spack core after cloning Spack
      • (Max) The following is related but specifically to "upgrading" Spack (i.e. both pulling the latest descriptions and also reinstalling environments) - see: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/28885
      • Summary:
        • If a user runs git pull, and it fails because of local modifications, we could have a Slack channel to answer questions related to git commands for Spack
        • Overall if git interactions can be simplified using convention, then that might be preferable to a spack update command that wraps git commands
  • (David) Do users know that git pull is "the way" to update Spack?
  • (Phil) Add an FAQ

For next week

Possible agenda items

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