Hi Elizabeth,
On 01/01/16 21:10, Elizabeth Fischer wrote:
Hello,
Can someone please explain what the altroot/altversion feature is?
It's about 3 weeks old, used once and documented nowhere.
The altroot/altversion easyconfig parameters that are only supported for
the Bundle easyblock (and it's derivatives) was created out of need, for
a very specific use case (but it may be used in other situations in the
future).
As you mention, it's currently only used once, in the new GCC easyconfig
that is actually a bundle of binutils and GCCcore (which is an actual
GCC installation), cfr.
https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyconfigs/blob/master/easybuild/easyconfigs/g/GCC/GCC-4.9.3-2.25.eb.
It's used there to indicate that the install prefix and version of the
GCCroot 'component' should be used for GCC itself.
That way, $EBROOTGCC will be defined like $EBROOTGCCCORE is, and
"get_software_root('GCC')" will work as expected even though GCC is
installed as a bundle.
You're right that there's no fleshed out documentation for this (yet),
but this is true for several other 'custom' easyconfig parameters.
You can get some basic information on it via the 'eb' command line though:
$ eb -a -e Bundle | egrep 'altroot|altversion'
altroot* Software name of dependency to use to define $EBROOT for
this bundle [default: None]
altversion* Software name of dependency to use to define $EBVERSION
for this bundle [default: None]
regards,
Kenneth
