Telcon: 2022 10 12

Attendees

• Massimiliano Culpo (host)
• Mark Krentel
• Davide DelVento
• Harmen Stoppels
• Jonathon Anderson
• Richarda Butler
• Robert Underwood
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Peter Scheibel
• Todd Gamblin

Agenda items

• Users Q&A
  • Robert: libpressio ecosystem PR
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32630
    • Todd: do we clear/set RHOME?
      • We clear a number of env variables (e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH)
      • Does the R package set RHOME?
        • It should
    • Maintaining a fork for a number of packages
      • In each case there is patch for each release
  • Jonathon: buildcache improvements
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32136
      • This caches the binaries but not the signatures
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32137
      • (This doesn't push to the index)
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32290
      • (Peter) self assigned
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32300
      • (Checking with Scott on this)
    • https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/32583
      • There are also PRs from Tom, Greg, and Harmen on this
        • In Tom's case, binutils >= 2.23 will alias some strings in the binary
          • This has considerations that could avoid issues with a direct approach like string replacement
  • Mark: update to hpctoolkit
    • removed support for hpctoolkit+mpi
    • the gitlab ci runs this
    • For now can you update the ci file?
    • Todd: will point to the CI file and remove hpctoolkit+mpi
• Discussion on proposed or upcoming features (possible topics)
  • Improvements to Gitlab pipelines
  • DAG model and use cases for compiler as dependencies
  • Packages supporting multiple build-systems
  • (Peter) https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/31357
• (Peter) desired modeling for compiler assignment - minimizing mismatches:
  • if you have W -> X -> [Y, Z]
  • Spack will prefer W%clang -> X%gcc -> [y%gcc, Z%gcc]
  • to W%clang -> X%clang -> [y%gcc, Z%gcc]
  • (i.e. in Spack’s model, there is only one mismatch in the first case)

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
• (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