Telcon: 2022 07 20

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Phil Regier
• Mark Krentel
• Greg Becker

Agenda items

• Discussion: should packages.yaml preferences be prioritized above reuse?
  • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/27987 should be updated to mention the schema in the PR description
  • Peter: @Mark I want to make sure that your specific interest is to use priorities (if you are frustrated when a request isn't respected, then perhaps a requirement is in fact the easiest approach)
    • It sounds like in his specific case,
  • Max: If we have requirements, do we still need preferences?
    • Greg: yes: you can use preferences to steer Spack to use externals, but still allow it to build something new (e.g. some system-installed CMake version that isn't the newest, we might want to encourage Spack to use it)
    • Mark: yes:
      • Those things which are optional could be handled with a variant which is off by default
      • But, if people disagree on the default variant value, that could suggest a preference (e.g. Boost: build all the libs, or as few as possible)
      • i.e. preferences could be used at the site level to override defaults on a per-site basis (because for some reason users at that site generally all have the same preference)
      • Specific example: binutils; we wanted ~nls but that changed in the builtin repo
  • Question about https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/27987: can you specify a required /hash
• Mark Krentel: we should add https://github.com/spack/spack/discussions/31525 to the README and other pointers

Possible Agenda items

• (Massimiliano) Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-06-08: multiple build systems used by one package
• (Matt) if we build an environment, and one package fails, then module files are not generated
  • Want spack module refresh but only to generate module files that haven't been generated yet
• Updating compiler wrapper to strip -Werror (optionally): https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/30284
• (Wileam) Adding fpm as a build system
  • Issue on fpm repo: https://github.com/fortran-lang/fpm/issues/79
• Default action for concretization in environments: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/29942#issuecomment-1097287194
• Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-04-06: warning() directive
• (Wileam) Can't bootstrap llvm@13 and @14 if gold is enabled (which is the default behavior) https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/29350
  • Pinpointed issue to external package (binutils carried by OS) based on comment
  • PR drafted: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/30954
  • Can externals detection be expanded from executables only to arbitrary files (e.g. header or .a/.so library files)?
• Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-04-13: not in spec syntax