Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

  
  
  
  
  
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On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 07:57:42AM +0000, Francois Bissey wrote:


On 4/04/2019, at 20:44, Fabian Groffen grobian@g.o wrote:
Thanks for your explanation, I���m sure there must be some ���pain��� in even having to describe the situation ���
Fabian

Large HPC system are just a different beast from your regular desktop or server. There is a high number of people or research groups all with different requirements. Trying to satisfy everyone is madness and require extremely flexible tools. spack, prefix, anaconda, easybuild are all potential tools for the situation. While spack may be more flexible I won���t pretend it solve every situations.

One particular thing is that we may be coming from a different angle, in that I want Prefix (or Spack) to do an user-land end-around of sysadmins. Generally, at least in my experience, sysadmins don���t have enough time, and/or are very reluctant to install new packages, even though the users require them.
What already exists is modules (environment modules), but they are a pain because we require the user to be able to load them correctly ��� and also require the sysadmins to install them consistently. I have at least three different systems that have different core admin teams, and their modules don���t have the same names or environment variables.
Also, if people are wondering, ���well why don���t you use docker?��� Well, that���s whole another can of worms that I won���t get into; needless to say, the supercomputer centers I am at can���t/don���t/won���t use docker for these sorts of user-land customizability issues.