Conference-call-notes-20140611.md

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Notes on the 13th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday June 11th 2014 (1.15pm - 1.45pm CET)

• follow link in "Video calls" section on EasyBuild community Google+ page

Attendees

Alphabetical list of attendees (4):

• Pablo Escobar (UniBas - SIB, Switzerland)
• Petar Forai (GMI, Austria)
• Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
• Bart Verleye (NeSI, New Zealand)

Agenda

• discuss deprecated functionality, outlook to EasyBuild v2.0
  • see also https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/wiki/Deprecated-functionality

Notes

General remarks

• some deprecated functionality is only relevant for people who have been using EasyBuild v0.x
• tags/examples should be added for the most important changes
• overall, all changes can be easily taken into account when the deprecated behavior is no longer supported (EasyBuild v2.0)

Python compatibility

• Python 2.4 support will be deprecated soon, long term goal is a codebase which is Python 2.6.x/2.7.x and Python 3.x compatible
  • Petar: Python 3 is already the default on Ubuntu, getting Python 2.x to work is a problem

EasyBuild configuration

• old-style configuration is deprecated, switching to new-style configuration should be no problem
• see https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild/wiki/Configuration#legacy-configuration-deprecated

Easyconfig parameters

• software_license will (maybe) become mandatory
  • should specify which license the software is released under (e.g. GPLv2, BSD, commercial, etc.)
  • goal is to track another imporant aspect of the software we install (next to e.g. homepage, etc.)
  • can be used to decide which sources can be redistributed in the context of an EasyBuild sources archive (which is presently vaporware)
  • UNKNOWN may be included as a valid value for software_license (which would kind of make it non-mandatory however)
• makeopts/premakeopts are deprecated, buildopts/prebuildopts should be used
  • only since EasyBuild v1.13.0, so easyconfig files in easybuild-easyconfigs repo haven't been updated accordingly yet
  • it should be safe to switch the buildopts/prebuildopts now, easyblocks/easyconfigs that still use makeopts/premakeopts will continue working until EasyBuild v2.0 (mapping from makeopts to buildopts is done internally by eb)
  • (post-conf call note: easybuild-easyconfigs unit tests should fail on use of makeopts or premakeopts)

Easyblocks API

• these changes are only relevant for people with their own (non-contributed) custom easyblocks
• extra_options static method should now return a value of type dict (rather than a list of tuples)
  • this is handled already is existing easyblocks available in the easybuild-easyblocks repo, via a super call to the parent easyblock; the abstract class EasyBlock (part of the framework) will spit out the right return type in the end
    • examples: [[generic MakeCp easyblock|https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyblocks/tree/master/easybuild/easyblocks/generic/makecp.py]] - [[WRF easyblock easyblock|https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-easyblocks/tree/master/easybuild/easyblocks/w/wrf.py]]
• other changes to the easyblocks API are minor, and shouldn't affect end users

easybuild.tools.modules Python module

• was reorganized in EasyBuild v1.8.0
• internal to EasyBuild, shouldn't affect end users

Other changes

• most important other change is moving functions to different modules:
  • run_cmd/run_cmd_qa to easybuild.tools.run (from *.filetools)
  • read_environment and modify_env to easybuild.tools.environment (from *.utilities and *.filetools resp.)