Hello Pablo, Easybuilders, On Jun 22, 2016, at 10:35 PM, Pablo Escobar Lopez <pablo.escobarlo...@unibas.ch> wrote: > 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
as with all things, there is something you gain and something you lose: * if we max-out the dependencies on OS side, we are at the mercy of that during upgrades to survive (think esp. rhel6->rhel7) * if we max-out on dependencies on EB side, we have to own the maintenance of a ton of things via easyconfigs (not time efficient) I’m glad to hear you Pablo to come back closer to “mainstream” practice; I’d agree that X11 deps are unclear domain. In fact, this reminds me that PR#610 of Povray got needlessly stuck due to being lost in the maze of providing x11 deps. Nothing special about it, the only issue was that we were too many people near it and there was too much choice! It would be good to have an “expected standard” so that we wouldn’t need to renegotiate it each time! F. -- echo "sysadmin know better bash than english" | sed s/min/mins/ \ | sed 's/better bash/bash better/' # signal detected in a CERN forum
