Telcon: 2023 09 13

Wednesday September 13th, 9am PT (UTC -7:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Davide DelVento
• Mark Krentel
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Nick Romero
• Richarda Butler
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Vivek

Agenda

This meeting is for Q&A: there are no pre-planned general topics.

• Vivek: a PR was approved, how do I get it merged
  • You can request a review in #pull-requests (on slack)
  • Or directly ping someone like myself (scheibelp)
• Mark: does anyone have experience with meson builds?
  • There is a meson Spack package
    • How well is it supported?
  • (Peter) Do we build any meson packages in our CI?
  • Use case: was considering changing a build from autotools to meson
    • FWIW, you can add a build_system variant to optionally build with meson
• Nick: question about using Spack to generate modules
  • There is a tutorial on modules, but is there any docs on best practices for generating modules hierarchically?
    • second question: what do people do at most sites? do they spack load? do they use modules?
      • Peter: I know there are sites that do both (and that they have good reasons for both); I don't know how many people do each
      • Davide: If you maintain a long-lived spack instance (and later do installations with a newer one) you can generate module files and then don't have to worry about which Spack to use to spack load
  • Use case: NFS directory with one spack repo
    • Several different architectures (amd, arm, risc5...)
    • e.g. log into a host with AMD zen3 target
      • my shared filesystem has multiple instances of zlib installed with different targets
      • say I want to load zlib
      • when I spack load zlib on the zen3 system, I want it to automatically pick the "right" zlib, the one that is built for the platform I'm logged into