Telcon: 2015 10 29

Participants

• Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
• Ben Boeckel (Kitware)
• Mike Collette (LLNL)
• Greg Becker (LLNL)
• Greg Lee (LLNL)
• David Beckingsale (LLNL)
• Matt Legendre (LLNL)
• Jennifer Green (LANL)

Pull Requests merged

• Greg Becker (LLNL):
  • Cache installed packages in a database/index of specs.
    • Makes spack find, other commands much faster.
    • Foundation for external installs/later RPM build support.
    • Uses ref counting internally to track old specs that may have been removed but are still needed.
• Peter Scheibel (LLNL):
  • spack test-install command New command for doing automated testing of packages, breaking installs into dependencies, with each as a test case.
• Ben Boeckel (Kitware):
  • ParaView
    • First working version!
  • ncurses update
  • use dict.setdefault
  • use uname for arch
  • dbus: disable systemd
• Massimiliano Culpo (EPFL):
  • clang: updated versions and better depends_on
  • gcc: updated versions and variants
• David Beckingsale (LLNL):
  • Better OpenMPI wrappers by David Beckingsale (LLNL)
• Mark Miller (LLNL):
  • better URL version detection
• Paul Dapolito (Harvey Mudd):
  • add xz library version 5.2.2

Cray update

• Mario Melara came to LLNL Wednesday
  • Made progress with Todd and Greg on the Cray port.
  • Greg Becker discovered modulecmd python [... cmds ...] option -- can spit out Python code, no need for shell!
  • Suggested refactorings:
    • spec.architecture -> platform
    • each platform has several targets (like Cray)
    • preferred front and backend targets
  • Differs slightly from previous plan.

Other News

• Lots of discussion on the mailing list:
  • Propagated variants (again)
  • and other issues on mailing list
  • Mark Miller wants mechanism in Spack to find the link order of dependency libraries.
    • MOAB -> NetCDF -> HDF5 is the example case.
    • HDF5 requires you to link to ~4 libs but it is an indirect dep of MOAB.
    • Why not use pkg-config or nc-config for this?
• Discussion with Tom Brunner (LLNL) about build environments and package managers vs. meta-build systems
  • Spack could use some more developer features, like diy

Discussion

• RPM builds?
• Interesting module purge issues.