Dear John-Paul,
On 08/05/2018 18:47, John-Paul Robinson wrote:
Hi,
We are working on a build of FSL with SLURM support patches. During the
build we found that the FSL easybuild unpacks the upstream source
tarball in the installdir and doesn't use the builddir. This is by
design in the fsl easy block. (self.build_in_installdir = True)
I suspect this is an artifact of the pre-built binaries distributed for
FSL that would be unpacked in place. The current easyconfig for fsl,
however, downloads the source tarball and appears to do a regular source
build.
Despite being the main author of the FSL easyblock, I don't exactly
recall when the FSL easyblock does a "build-in-installdir" procedure.
It's probably mostly due to laziness or not knowing what exactly needs
to installed. The install_step method is currently empty, we get away
with that exactly because we're building in the installation directory...
As far as I can tell, this is still the case for recent FSL easyconfigs
too, since they just leverage the FSL easyblock.
Which easyconfig file are you referring to exactly?
There's nothing inherently wrong with building in the install dir, its
just that in our environment the installdir is a NFS share. Unpacking
the FSL tarball to that location is very slow (~5 min). If we specify a
local disk for installdir then the upack is nearly instantaneous.
I'm wondering if this build behavior with the installdir should be
maintained or if a more standard fsl build should be pursued.
It would definitely be better to have a cleanly separated build &
installation directory, partially for the reason you mention (to speed
up the installation when the final destination in a (slow) shared
filesystem), but also for other reasons (clean installation, etc.).
And now for the million dollar question: are you planning to work on
that yourself? If so, do let us know if you have any questions!
If so, it probably make sense to update the easyblock such that it does
a cleanly separated build & install procedure for the latest version of
FSL onwards.
regards,
Kenneth
Thanks for any insights,
John-Paul
HPC Architect
U. AL at Birmingham
