2016-06-22 22:57 GMT+02:00 Jack Perdue <[email protected]>: > On 06/22/2016 03:31 PM, McGough, Benjamin E wrote: > > I have been struggling with creating a clean environment in which to > build with EasyBuild and test easyconfigs. > > I wish I could be pardoned if I just left a: > > 8^) > > and walked away... > > You are not alone. > > On our present cluster, I have done the best to strip > RH/CentOS -devel packages to force use of EB modules > on GPFS. In terms of X11 I'm already convinced I'm going > to try to get us to use the system X11 libs and not fight that > battle with EB.
I also use the same approach. I install everything which is X11 related from system packages. I find too complex to install X11 libs using easybuild and I don't see any special advantage. As example, I install cairo-devel rpm in our machines. > EB's use of X11 _is_ very inconsistent. And > a royal pain in the arse. > > I'm not complaining... I'm just saying that there is some tweaking > that can be done. > > For our next cluster (RH/CentOS 6 or 7... dunno yet)... I plan to strip > everything > out of EB that I can get from CentOS or EPEL.... I'm sick of dealing > with X11 in EB. > > Our new approach will basically be "if a customer requires an app that > needs a newer version, build it with EB... else use the upstream version". > > In terms of EB, being a RH person for now, it would be nice to see two > fully decked out easyconfig trees... one with all the -devel packages > installed and one with none of them. > > I have followed the same road in different direction :) First I was using system packages for most dependencies which were no scientific software like zlib, bzip2, ncurses, libpng and similars (that's why I implemented "eb --filter-deps" option) but now I prefer to provide all those deps using easybuild as hidden modules (eb --hide-deps) and rely on system only for X11 related stuff. The main advantage I see for this approach is that this way the software stack is more self-contained. Now I use centos6 and when we upgrade to centos7 all scientific apps in my software stack will still use same dependencies and in theory this should help for scientific results reproducibility. There are also many scientific apps which require a different dependencies that the ones provided by system packages Pretty sure I know who will have to do the work to see that happen. > > jack > > > > -- Pablo Escobar López HPC systems engineer sciCORE, University of Basel SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics http://scicore.unibas.ch
