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Hi,
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As someone who was involved until very recently in installing software
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on the New Zealand national facility I feel I should take exception to some
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of these comments.
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To put things in perspective
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1) I am using Gentoo since 2003
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2) I am a regular contributor to the science team and maintain sage-on-gentoo
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3) I pushed for a while to have prefix working on ppc64 (the hardware was
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at some time part of the national facility above)
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4) I have contributed code to spack and help fix some issues with libtool
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in spack and occasionally suggests fix to some packages.
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Gentoo prefix is awesome but some areas are not as flexible as spack.
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Mainly because it is designed like a gentoo distro as a single tree
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install. Everything goes into one prefix.
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What spack allows you to do (and that is a usual requirement):
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allow and maintain an unhealthy forest of softwares:
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1) across several versions
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2) across various compilers
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The whole dynamically loadable via “modules”. Each bits in its own bubble.
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This also has limitation of course.
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Gentoo has slots that does multiple versions of some software but it is
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not a universal feature (nor should it be on the point of view of a distro).
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Basically if you want to reproduce some the scenarios managed by spack you
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need multiple prefix.
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That’s not to say spack wouldn’t benefit from a dose of gentoo and vice versa.
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But some Gentoo features have been voluntarily avoided :(
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Now prefix was very useful to me to offer a base userland on top of SLES 11.1
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(which couldn’t be updated for various reasons) that was much more recent and
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feature-full than I would otherwise have had access too. And then I could put
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something like spack on top if I wanted to.
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François
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> On 4/04/2019, at 07:57, Guilherme Amadio <amadio@g.o> wrote: |
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> |
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> Hi Jon, |
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> |
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>> On 3 Apr 2019, at 12:56, Jon Woodring <woodring@××××.gov> wrote: |
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>> |
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>> Looking at the GSOC, I noticed that it’s mentioned that one of Prefix’s goals is to bring Gentoo to HPC, and actually that’s where I was trying to use Prefix. |
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>> |
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>> I don’t know if you’re familiar with Spack https://spack.io/, but I was exploring using Prefix and portage, because it has a larger community and more features. |
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> |
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> Yes, I’m advocating for using prefix for HEP (at CERN) and HPC in the HSF packaging group, |
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> but I think that they are unfortunately more interested in using spack, even though it |
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> doesn’t seem to be mature enough for what is its intended use. In any case, since you are |
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> from LANL, if your cluster has CVMFS mounted (i.e. /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch), then you can already |
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> use prefix! I have prefix installed in CVMFS, which I discussed at CHEP: |
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> https://indico.cern.ch/event/587955/contributions/2938043/ |
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> |
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> Just run /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch/lcg/contrib/gentoo/linux/x86_64/startprefix to get started. |
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> |
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> In principle, there’s nothing preventing you from using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=‘x86_64’ in your |
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> prefix configuration. It’s just not tried by anyone yet. We all use ~x86_64 for now for |
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> prefix on Linux. On Mac OS X there’s no stable keyword, ~*-macos are the only ones. |
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> |
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> My first talk about prefix for HSF packaging group: |
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> https://indico.cern.ch/event/672745/ |
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> |
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> Other related links: |
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> https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/workinggroups/packaging.html |
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> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hsf-packaging-wg |
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> https://indico.cern.ch/category/7975/ |
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> |
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> Cheers, |
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> -Guilherme |