Telcon: 2023 04 12

Held Wednesday April 12th, 9am PT (UTC -7:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Mark Krentel
• Jack Morrison
• Phil Regier
• Laurent Aphecetche
• Richarda Butler
• Srinath Vadlamani
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Chris Green
• Harmen Stoppels
• Brian Van Essen

Agenda

This meeting is just Q&A: there are no pre-planned general Spack topics

• Mark: iconvert doesn't work well with pkgconfig
  • See: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/36758
  • There is a iconv virtual in Spack
  • Also an issue with libintl (may be provided by GNU libc)
  • See also: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/35450
  • Could we implement def libs in libiconv?
    • Some packages set the prefix to the package (e.g. --without-libiconv-prefix): https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/35450/files#diff-20121b38816abb9413599cc050d8ff6b9b627cfafac1469cf9e3c38872a3072a
• Srinath: ping on https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/35756
  • Contains a workaround
  • Also links to an older issue with more detail
  • Srinath: this case is using a spack.yaml with ldflags (so not parsing compiler flags from the command line)
  • Massimiliano: https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/385834bd43e1958667b7f75074e07f412d6f58ab/lib/spack/spack/cmd/__init__.py#L213-L216
• Jack: libfabrics adds a dependency on linux-headers
  • No other package has a dependency on the linux-headers
  • Universally doing this is potentially problematic (conflicts with the actual system headers)
  • Phil: these headers may contain struct definitions
  • How old is the OS?
    • If it's too old, should we be preventing the installation of libfabrics?
  • See: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/36474/files#diff-de946e4c4e9c41d78223e716ade659a6c416e8b27a5805e08ac5634a20232557R115
• Chris: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/35450 has some CI errors
  • How to reproduce?
    • Find the failing stage to see the log in the pipeline UI
    • At the end of the log there is a message like "to reproduce this build locally..." with some instructions
    • E.g. https://gitlab.spack.io/spack/spack/-/jobs/6517196 from https://gitlab.spack.io/spack/spack/-/pipelines/330950

(In case we have some time after user questions)

• Massimiliano Why comments are stripped from the spack.yaml file on certain modifications to the file? How can we avoid it?
  • See https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/31091
• Massimiliano Proposed to change the default build_type of CMakePackages to Release instead of RelWithDebInfo.
  • See https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/36679