Telcon: 2023 01 18

Held Wednesday January 18th, 9am PT

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Daniele
• Phil Regier
• Alex Richert

Agenda

(This will be just Q&A - there are no pre-planned general Spack discussion items)

• Daniele: can you run CI on custom package repositories
  • Yes, and build binary caches with custom repositories as well
  • Tammy: sources and examples:
    • https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pipelines.html#
    • https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command_index.html#spack-ci
    • https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pipelines.html#spack-commands-supporting-pipelines
    • https://spack-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial_binary_cache.html
    • You can just use spack in gitlab to generate a build cache if that is all you want. My (dated?) minimal build-cache example defines only one stage -- build -- in the .gitlab-ci.yml. The before_script for the stage clones spack and sets up the environment (to include copying my spack.yaml and .gitlab-ci.yml to $SPACK_ROOT). The script performs spack install. The after_script performs spack buildcache create -f -d ${MIRROR_DIR} and uses spack gpg create to export/create the gpg key.
    • Spack supports package definitions of stand-alone tests (https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#stand-alone-or-smoke-tests) to check installed software using the spack test run command (https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command_index.html#spack-test-run and https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#spack-test-run) and the --tests option to spack ci rebuild (https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pipelines.html#spack-ci-rebuild).
    • Spack currently has one CI stack using the --tests option: https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/share/spack/gitlab/cloud_pipelines/stacks/e4s/spack.yaml
  • Massimiliano: note that spack ci is more for doing an ongoing verification of packages using gitlab vs. deploying a set of packages to a distribution etc.
• Alex: trying to use Spack to install everything on a system
  • Want to deliver package.py updates as needed
    • But not the core
  • Peter: for now this is somewhat manual: you would want to update repos.yaml to point to a separate git checkout of Spack
    • beyond that: there are compatibility issues
      • E.g. if you pull recipes edited after we added multi-build-system support a couple months ago, those new packages would not work with an older spack
      • Massimiliano: upcoming compilers-as-dependencies changes may have a similar effect