Telcon: 2015 07 16

Participants

• Todd Gamblin (LLNL)
• Jim Galarowicz (Krell)
• Chris Chambreau (LLNL)
• Greg Lee (LLNL)

Contributions

• More packages from Tom Scogland
  • 8894851: gnu global tags, ctags
  • fda208f: YAPF
• Mark Miller has built a new HDF5 package and will be checking it in.

Bugfixes

• A number of bugs discovered by Mark Miller running on ANL's Vesta machine:
  • Fixed a regression in spack install -j
  • Fixed incompatibility with Python 2.6 in .format() expression in vim
  • Fixed #77 (error with optional dependencies depending on variants with default values)
    • See bugfix/optional-dep-fix branch.

Issues

• Issue running on Vesta (smaller BG/Q at ANL):
  • SoftEnv blows away Spack's environment in sub-shells (discovered by Mark Miller)
  • Only way to disable is touch ~/.nosoft -- no other good ways.
  • Has the problem that multiple spack instances run by the same user (and also distributed builds when we have those) will fight over ~/.nosoft.
  • Need an environment variable to disable SoftEnv
  • ANL will add SOFTENV_NOSOFT env var to SoftEnv so spack can disable it at build time without races/contention.

Discussion

• Release is going slowly -- should we push something out now to get it out there?
  • develop already much better than 0.8, and has original 0.9 planned features (optional deps, variants)
• Jim: will spack externals support packages other than MPI? Packages like boost?
  • Todd: yes -- Matt's implementation treats an external as a prefix
    • Some trickiness w.r.t. dependencies of external & constraints (see notes from last time)
• Jim has more of the CBTF build working
  • Wants module dependencies to make the build load its dependencies