Dear easybuilders, I have made my first experiences with easybuild, and tried a few things. I am really happy that I ran across your project, it is great work. But some questions remain, maybe you can give me some advice.
(1) choosing a (single) toolchain We run a cluster for Bioinformatics software, with RHEL 6.4 and 10 GbE but no Infiniband. If I understood correctly, goalf-1.1.0-no-OFED is the toolchain of choice, right? (2) what if there is no eb for my toolchain? I noticed that for some programs, there are no goalf-1.1.0-no-OFED easybuilds. Amoung these, there are essentials like Perl. I understand that there will be conflicts if users try load a goalf-based module (say, Perl) and a goolf-based module (say Python) at the same time (zlib). Would you recommend to build Perl with goolf-1.4.10, or to create a Perl-5.16.3-goalf-1.1.0-no-OFED.eb myself? Maybe there is a reason that there is no such easyconfig? Should I trust the --try-options? (3) OS Independence Besides the fact that easybuild bootstraps its own compiler, it still uses some OS ressources. For example, if I use GCC/4.6.3 to compile helloworld.c on a compute node (with no development tools installed), ld complains about crt1.o not being there. So I am wondering: To what extend are the resulting packages OS-independent? If I build on RHEL 6.4, will they run on RHEL 6.3, 6.5, RHEL 5 (or even Ubuntu)? (4) Best practice for new releases How would you deploy new releases of software, for example when a new release of easybuild comes out? I decided that a new release would go into a new EASYBUILD_INSTALLPATH, and I inform users to update their .modulerc to contain the new modulepath. Is this what you would recommend? Best regards, Olaf R&D IT Bayer Business Services GmbH BBS-ITS-R&D-HealthCare Research 13353 Berlin Geschäftsführung: Daniel Hartert, Vorsitzender | Wilhelm Oehlschläger, Arbeitsdirektor Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Werner Baumann Sitz der Gesellschaft: Leverkusen | Amtsgericht Köln, HRB 49895
