Telcon: 2022 09 14

(held September 14th 2022)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Mark Krentel
• Davide DelVento
• Dom Heinzeller
• Erik Palmer
• Justin Cook (NERSC)
• Richarda Butler
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Shahzeb Siddiqui
• Srinath Vadlamani
• Tammy Dahlgren

Agenda items

• See discussion on dropping Python 2 support in newer Spack versions: https://github.com/spack/spack/discussions/31824
  • This includes:
    • Running Spack with Python 2
    • Installing Python 2 with Spack
  • Note: installing Python 2.7 by itself is easy: installing the py-* packages imposes most of the maintenance burden
  • (Massimiliano) We could move the current py-* packages to a new repository
    • Most of the logic for installing them is probably in PythonPackage, so a separate repo is not enough
    • This might encourage moving the build system into the repo
      • Or versioning it
  • Have we inventoried packages to look for cases where Python 2 is required
    • Are there any we need?
  • For users who only have Python 2 on their system, how can they get Python 3 to run Spack?
    • Use older Spack to install it (0.19 will still be able to use Python 2.7)
    • Use system's repo managers (e.g. yum or apt)
• (Shahzeb) Issues with loaded modules https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/27124
• (Mark) spack compiler find should be able to take a module, and in that case it should populate the modules property
• New bug: https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/32651
  • Should be fixed by https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32653/

Next week

• 31953 and 32478

Possible Agenda items

• (Davide) Desire to duplicate an installation
  • Does overwrite of spack.lock/spack.yaml work?
  • You can also "version" the environment: copy the lock/yaml to a new environment in the production environment (then, if users have no issues with the new environment, remove the old environment)
  • If the user exposes the packages in the environment with modules, do we need per-environment modules?
    • (Davide) In my case I version-control the modules so this isn't an issue
• (Davide) what about major version updates?
  • Do users pull major updates to their installations? How big a leap do people do in general? And how often?
  • (Peter) we may have a poll on this, but otherwise it would be interesting to conduct one
• (Chris) Options for spack style checking of user package repos (see https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/31938).
• (Brian) Sanitizing repo, getting rid of improperly-concretized packages (i.e. how do I get rid of old stuff I don't use now)
  • (in particular reuse)
• (Mark) Ping on #27247
• (Matt) Package reuse is nice, but how can we refresh a single package?
  • E.g. want to use the newest version of spectrum-mpi
• (Matt) How does spack deprecate handle refreshing module files for packages that depend on a deprecated spec in an lmod hierarchy?
  • e.g. if you deprecate the old MPI, does the lmod refresh use the newer MPI in the hierarchy
• (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 externals detection be expanded from executables only to arbitrary files (e.g. header or .a/.so library files)?
  • For llvm@13 and @14 with +gold, see issue comment and PR https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/30954
  • BLAS detection is also affected, see https://spackpm.slack.com/archives/C5W7NKZJT/p1659734369147249
• Continue from https://github.com/spack/spack/wiki/Telcon%3A-2022-04-13: not in spec syntax
• (Phil) Issues with SSL signature authentication at SNL, see https://spackpm.slack.com/archives/G7XED8NAD/p1660009273764719