Dear EasyBuilders,
I'm happy to announce the release of EasyBuild version 2.4.0 [1], the
best EasyBuild version so far to be published from Austin. Really.
One new feature that I want to point out in particular is the support
for eb -x, a.k.a. eb --extended-dry-run, which provides a dry run
overview of the build & install procedure that EasyBuild is going to
execute, in a matter of seconds.
This has been a much requested feature which I long deemed difficult to
implement. Although it involved quite a bit of work, it turned out to be
very feasible in the end.
I'm confident this is going to be a very valuable feature. Judge for
yourself by taking a look at the documentation for this feature, which
includes a couple of examples outputs [2].
Other highlights include:
* support for eb -x (a.k.a. eb --extended-dry-run) [2]
* support for --review-pr
* the 'eb' wrapper script has been simplified and made aware of
python2/python3
* experimental support for using minimal toolchains for
dependencies [3]
* thanks a lot to Alan O'OCais (JSC) for his hard work on this!
* experimental support for .yeb easyconfig files in YAML syntax [4]
* thanks a lot to Caroline, our summer intern at HPC-UGent, for
her work on finally making this happen!
* for now, this format should supports the equivalent of
current .eb easyconfigs
* the intention is to extend this to support 'fat' easyconfigs
(that cover multiple software versions and toolchain(s) (versions)
* 3 new generic easyblocks (OCamlPackge, SCons, Waf) + 2
software-specific easyblocks (OCaml, Samcef)
* support for 45 new software packages, bringing the total to 737
different software packages
* + various enhancements and small bug fixes
In addition, a long unnoticed bug in the sanity check implementation has
been fixed. The sanity check paths were not being checked as they should
be, i.e. no distinction was being made between files and directories,
and whether directories are non-empty was not being verified.
This issue was fixed in EasyBuild framework, and easyblocks/easyconfigs
in which the sanity check paths were incorrectly specified in one way or
another) were adjusted accordingly.
More details are available in the release notes [5].
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release in one way or another!
To upgrade to EasyBuild v2.4.0, there are several options:
(i) (re)bootstrap EasyBuild to obtain an EasyBuild/2.4.0 module to
load [6]
(ii) install EasyBuild v2.4.0 with a previous version of EasyBuild,
using the easyconfig file available in [7]
(iii) install EasyBuild v2.4.0 from PyPI, using one of the standard
Python installation tools (easy_install, pip, ...)
(iv) update your Git working copies of the different EasyBuild
repositories
Enjoy!
regards,
Kenneth
EasyBuild release manager
[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/easybuild
[2] http://easybuild.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Extended_dry_run.html
[3]
http://easybuild.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Manipulating_dependencies.html#minimal-toolchains
[4]
http://easybuild.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Writing_yeb_easyconfig_files.html
[5]
http://easybuild.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Release_notes.html#v2-4-0-november-10th-2015
[6]
http://easybuild.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Installation.html#bootstrapping-easybuild
[7] https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/pull/2130
