enhance ConfigureMake generic easyblock to allow using it to install extensions

[boegel]

No description provided.

[boegel]

@wpoely86, @hajgato: please review

@ocaisa: this is a small enhancement to the ConfigureMake easyblock in order to support installing a bundle of X11 packages... (PR with easyconfig coming up)

[hajgato]

@boegel Its seems fine for me. I do not see what would be the consequences for other easyblocks, like in the case of PERL module. Is this the only one that affected?

[wpoely86]

👍

[boegel]

@hajgato the PerlModule generic easyblock should be the only one affected, yes; the change is needed because by making ConfigureMake derive from ExtensionEasyblock, we block multiple inheritance there...

I've been thinking some more about this, and I've been wondering whether this is the right approach. The extensions mechanism is really intended for stuff like Pyhton packages, Perl modules, R libraries, etc., i.e. language-specific packages that require a particular software package as a dependency.

By enhancing ConfigureMake like we do here, we've somewhat abusing this mechanism for other purposes.

I think maybe we should be enhancing the Bundle easyblock to support specifying a list of components instead, where you can indicate using which easyblock each of these components should be installed? That's a proper and more generic approach, but I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to implement that... Thoughts?

[hajgato]

@boegel I do think that Bunde should be enhanced as you said. The final goal should be the ability to install more than one package to a common "prefix". (But I do not see so deep into framework/blocks)

[boegel]

superseded by #980