Telcon: 2022 07 27

(Meeting to be held July 27th at 9am PT)

Jonathan: issues with Spack CI
- zlib pipeline compile fails: OpenSUSE-based container
- Problem bash -l (login shell, discards PATH etc.)
- See #31771
- Why do we use bash -l?
  - On other systems -l does not clear shell variables like PATH
  - In fact, it is most likely used in order to run bash profile scripts that might add more behavior
Davide: maintain two separate installs; try to maintain them in lockstep; occasionally install something in one and it works, then try in the other (expecting same results) and it fails
- Not an intuitive result
- The production instance sometimes has some different packages (the testing/staging instance)
- What's the difference between two specs
  - We have spack diff
  - It can't compare across environments
  - Or across installation prefixes
  - It would be useful to dump 2 specs to files (from anywhere) and then compare them
Mark: from https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/27987#issuecomment-1195880264
- hpctoolkit: wants binutils~nls, but doesn't need it
- Right now there's no way for a package to specify preferences on dependencies

(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

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