Just chiming in on this interesting topic :) On 04-04-2019 01:51:58 +0000, Francois Bissey wrote: > Hi, > > As someone who was involved until very recently in installing software > on the New Zealand national facility I feel I should take exception to some > of these comments. > To put things in perspective > 1) I am using Gentoo since 2003 > 2) I am a regular contributor to the science team and maintain sage-on-gentoo > 3) I pushed for a while to have prefix working on ppc64 (the hardware was > at some time part of the national facility above) > 4) I have contributed code to spack and help fix some issues with libtool > in spack and occasionally suggests fix to some packages. > > Gentoo prefix is awesome but some areas are not as flexible as spack. > Mainly because it is designed like a gentoo distro as a single tree > install. Everything goes into one prefix. > What spack allows you to do (and that is a usual requirement): > allow and maintain an unhealthy forest of softwares: > 1) across several versions > 2) across various compilers > The whole dynamically loadable via “modules”. Each bits in its own bubble. > This also has limitation of course. > Gentoo has slots that does multiple versions of some software but it is > not a universal feature (nor should it be on the point of view of a distro). > Basically if you want to reproduce some the scenarios managed by spack you > need multiple prefix.
So what scenarios exactly are these? Things like multilib support? We (at least I) stayed away from that feature in Prefix due to its added complexity. I guess nowadays it could be reconsidered (profile change/addition?), even though some of the concepts are flawed, hence the preference for completely separate prefixes. Thanks, Fabian > That’s not to say spack wouldn’t benefit from a dose of gentoo and vice versa. > But some Gentoo features have been voluntarily avoided :( > > Now prefix was very useful to me to offer a base userland on top of SLES 11.1 > (which couldn’t be updated for various reasons) that was much more recent and > feature-full than I would otherwise have had access too. And then I could put > something like spack on top if I wanted to. > > François > > > On 4/04/2019, at 07:57, Guilherme Amadio <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hi Jon, > > > >> On 3 Apr 2019, at 12:56, Jon Woodring <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> Looking at the GSOC, I noticed that it’s mentioned that one of Prefix’s > >> goals is to bring Gentoo to HPC, and actually that’s where I was trying to > >> use Prefix. > >> > >> I don’t know if you’re familiar with Spack https://spack.io/, but I was > >> exploring using Prefix and portage, because it has a larger community and > >> more features. > > > > Yes, I’m advocating for using prefix for HEP (at CERN) and HPC in the HSF > > packaging group, > > but I think that they are unfortunately more interested in using spack, > > even though it > > doesn’t seem to be mature enough for what is its intended use. In any case, > > since you are > > from LANL, if your cluster has CVMFS mounted (i.e. /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch), > > then you can already > > use prefix! I have prefix installed in CVMFS, which I discussed at CHEP: > > https://indico.cern.ch/event/587955/contributions/2938043/ > > > > Just run /cvmfs/sft.cern.ch/lcg/contrib/gentoo/linux/x86_64/startprefix to > > get started. > > > > In principle, there’s nothing preventing you from using > > ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=‘x86_64’ in your > > prefix configuration. It’s just not tried by anyone yet. We all use ~x86_64 > > for now for > > prefix on Linux. On Mac OS X there’s no stable keyword, ~*-macos are the > > only ones. > > > > My first talk about prefix for HSF packaging group: > > https://indico.cern.ch/event/672745/ > > > > Other related links: > > https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/workinggroups/packaging.html > > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hsf-packaging-wg > > https://indico.cern.ch/category/7975/ > > > > Cheers, > > -Guilherme > -- Fabian Groffen Gentoo on a different level
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