Telcon: 2025 07 23

Wednesday July 23rd, 9am PT (UTC -7:00)

Attendees

• Peter Scheibel (host)
• Berhane Temelso
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Dom H
• Diego Menéndez
• Gwen Dawes
• Vivek

Agenda

This meeting is for general Q&A (feel free to suggest a topic beforehand if desired)

• Berhane: release overview
  • https://github.com/spack/spack/releases/tag/v1.0.0
  • Berhane: should I do a clean start from 0.22?
    • Peter: I'll get back to you on that
• Gwen: merge request in spack
  • Package needs some TCL libs
  • when it compiles, it puts libraries into the TCL prefix
  • FWIW I'm using extends() vs depends()
  • PR is https://github.com/spack/spack-packages/pull/706, also I have a review question about CI
  • Peter: could we auto-detect this?
    • Gwen had to notice this (and e.g. for tcl-togl had to add an --exec-prefix)
  • Gwen: what about packages that aren't maintained
    • In EESSI (on top of EasyBuild) there's a notion of gold/silver/bronze
• Dom Heinzeller: 2 questions about Spack 1.0
  • Compilers now -> packages.yaml
  • and names changed, e.g. "intel" -> "oneapi"
  • but in preferences, it seems you can still say %clang vs %llvm, where does this happen
    • Peter: not sure (Dom will ask in slack)
  • Dom: Spack is more willing to build packages that are externals
    • buildable: false helps
    • But is there a way to more strongly prefer externals?
  • Note: https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packages_yaml.html#prevent-packages-from-being-built-from-sources
    • (this doesn't have suggestions beyond buildable: false, but adds context for others)
• Vivek: question about package repo
  • I have a clone of spack packages
  • I customized it with a repo of internal repo
  • I can spack info, spack edit
  • but spack spec, etc. complains about package not existing
  • See also spack repo migrate in https://github.com/spack/spack/releases/tag/v1.0.0
• Vivek do all my repos have to be on the same package API? I have a 2.2 and 2.0 repo
  • Peter: not sure: will get back to you on this
    • Follow-up: you can mix 2.0, 2.2, on spack 1.0.0: https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0.0/package_api.html ("Spack version 1.0.0 supports package repositories with a Package API version between v1.0 and v2.2, inclusive.")
• Diego: building gromacs on x86_64_v4, and everything else ...v3
  • all nodes are v3-compatible
  • only some nodes are v4-compatible
  • how would I expose gromacs only on v4 (i.e. module is only available on the v4 nodes)
• Diego: I was trying Spack 1.0, Core was not created for the lmod module hierarchy (I wanted to put git, grep, make etc. in there)
  • put something in core_compilers, hoping everything built with that ends up in Core, but that wasnt happening
  • spack compiler find was adding a compiler @version /hash under core_compilers, if I manually remove the /hash, it works