Hi Trey, On 09/14/2014 11:52 PM, Trey Dockendorf wrote:
Is it possible to re-generate a modulefile in EB for an existing application? I'm testing various tweaks to a modified version of the HierarchicalMNS that simply puts all names in lowercase, and am finding a few times when the only things I need to fix are related to the modulefile contents. Something like gcc takes a long time to have to rebuild just to get a new modulefile.
EasyBuild v1.15.0 has some support for only regenerating a module file, but it probably won't be sufficient for your purposes.
The --skip command line option allows to skip an existing builds, if a module is available. This is especially interesting when installing additional extensions, e.g. more Python libraries, Perl modules, R libraries, etc., by combining --skip with --force.
However, it's too limited for what you're looking for since it requires a module to be available already, so it won't work when playing around with different module naming schemes without reinstalling the software behind it.
We already have a feature like the one you're asking for in the works, i.e. --only-module, see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/pull/1018 .
This will involve breaking the (currently very hard) link between the install subdirectory and the module name, for example. The intention is that it will also allows to installing multiple modules for a single installation, and hence also install (only) modules under different module naming schemes than the one used for the original installation.
Current status is that it'll support regenerating module files using --only-module --force. It doesn't break the link between installation subdir and module naming scheme yet however (that's why it typically requires --force for now, to skip the sanity check step), which is key. So, this suffices for playing around with module naming schemes, but is insufficient for actually regenerating module files for production use. You will be able to load the modules generated under a different module naming scheme via --only-module --force, but they won't use the right install directories.
We hope to get this feature finished in time for EasyBuild v1.16.0 (mid October 2014).
For now, your best option would be to use the patch in the --only-module PR together with manually renaming the installation directory to match the new module name (which is probably a can of worms).
Or even better: build upon the patch provided in the open PR and enhance it to match what we have in mind for it... Let us know if you're up for that.
regards, Kenneth
