Telcon: 2024 03 27

Wednesday March 27th, 9am PT (UTC -7:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Davide DelVento
• Bernhard
• Jakov Petrina

Agenda

(This week the meeting is for Q&A, there are no pre-planned topics)

• Davide: how to add -L flags to a package build?
  • Peter: is this a case where you have a dependency with a directory that you want recognized as a library directory?
    • If so, you can implement .libs in the dependency
      • See: https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#blas-lapack-and-scalapack-libraries
      • See: https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#custom-attributes
      • Peter: neither of these fully explain that every file returned by this is automatically converted into a -L
      • There are examples of .libs in the builtin packages (generally they use find_libraries)
  • Davide, in my case I needed to add -D... CMake options
    • Could there be documentation in Spack about the recommendations for this
    • e.g. how to influence CMake's find_package
  • Davide: no CI for testing on MacOS
• Bernhard: CI is building E4S environment
  • Also, what about packages outside of this set?
    • i.e. not every package that is changed is built
    • Peter: yes - only packages mentioned in share/spack/gitlab/cloud_pipelines (or those packages they depend on) are built as part of CI
  • Can we dynamically build everything?
    • Not every variant combination, but rather, one configuration of each package
    • This could be time consuming
  • Bernhard: maybe it would be less time-consuming to generate a build dynamically for a package PR
    • Peter: one off instances of builds can suffer from drift; also, users may not be willing in general to fix build problems w/other users
  • There is also a potential security issue w/ generating builds dynamically
  • Difficult to create code coverage of PR based on this
• Davide: can we talk about the possibility of outside compute sites running pipelines and submitting results to PRs to verify that they work?
  • Peter: e.g. this could push a PR to a site and they build on it (so instead of Spack running build from PR, we alert the external site to the PR's existence)
• Bernhard: Can we automate aspects of Python package review?
  • Harmen is working on automatically generating the updates themselves, and that same logic might be useful for verifying
  • Conda has Grayskull