[gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

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[gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Benda Xu]

Hi Jon,

Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> writes:

> Is there an option for running the bootstrap script to make sure it is
> using non-tilde packages? (Or maybe latest prefix overlay patches,
> i.e. is it a bug?)
>
> I noticed that I couldn’t install prefix with glibc unless I set the
>package atom to the last non-tilde version (=sys-libs/glibc-2.27-r6).
>
> FYI, it fails with the latest glibc complaining that it can’t find a
> proper Python environment, which I am guessing, that the patches from
> the prefix overlay don’t exist? (I’m just hazarding a wild guess.)
>
> If it’s a bug, I can submit a bug report; I wasn’t sure if it was user
> error or not.

Thank you for your interest.  It is a huge bug actually: Prefix has not
ever been stabilized.

In the mean while, I am interested in mentoring a motivated student to
carry us through the stabilizing process.

  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2019/Ideas#Stabilize_Gentoo_Prefix

Please help spread this GSOC idea to the potential students.

Yours,
Benda

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

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Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hi Jon,

> On 3 Apr 2019, at 12:56, Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> 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

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

Thanks for the links Guilherme; it's really interesting because that's exactly
the sort of thing I was looking for.

I don't know of where we might have CVMFS mounted, because I don't work with
the HEP/ROOT community, but it might be somewhere. I take it that it's just
a FUSE implementation that I could mount on my own machine?

That said, if I am unable to get CVMFS working (it doesn't look like it will be
trouble), do you have a git repo of your ebuilds that I could take a look at?
I'm curious about the ebuilds that you're using in the environment.

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hi Jon,

> On 3 Apr 2019, at 18:11, Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the links Guilherme; it's really interesting because that's exactly
> the sort of thing I was looking for.
> 
> I don't know of where we might have CVMFS mounted, because I don't work with
> the HEP/ROOT community, but it might be somewhere. I take it that it's just
> a FUSE implementation that I could mount on my own machine?

Just try to "ls /cvmfs", it’s usually mounted at this mount point. But yes, you
can mount on your own machine. You only need sft.cern.ch CVMFS repository to use
the prefix I have installed.

> That said, if I am unable to get CVMFS working (it doesn't look like it will be
> trouble), do you have a git repo of your ebuilds that I could take a look at?
> I'm curious about the ebuilds that you're using in the environment.

I use mostly ebuilds from the standard tree, I have very few additions of my own.
They are here, though, if you’d like to take a look: https://github.com/amadio/gentoo-overlay

If you want to know what I have installed instead, then I can provide a list of
the packages, but I currently only use the CVMFS prefix for testing ROOT, so I have
only ROOT and its deps installed for the most part.

Cheers,
-Guilherme

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Francois Bissey]

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.
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 <amadio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jon,
> 
>> On 3 Apr 2019, at 12:56, Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> 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

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Fabian Groffen]

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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 <amadio@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Jon,
> > 
> >> On 3 Apr 2019, at 12:56, Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> 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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Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Francois Bissey]

> On 4/04/2019, at 19:49, Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 

It can be several versions of the same software as stated earlier. Either executable
or libraries.
For example while gromacs 5.x was stable a user wanted me to resurrect a copy of gromacs
3 something because it was the last version with a particular potential in the feature
set and that’s what they wanted to use.
You can have the same software compiled with different compilers. Which can be various
version of gcc/intel compilers or other proprietary compiler (PGI comes to mind as well
as cray which has its own toolchain). Because of potential incompatibilities in the 
Fortran binary interface you will have a tree by fortran compiler vendor and sometimes
different version of the same compiler (gcc 4 to 6, gcc 7 and gcc 8 all have a different
runtime want to troll bugzilla to see how many problems that created to users?).
People will want a particular compiler because the software they use compiled with
another compiler won’t pass the test suite or crash in their particular extreme 
scenario. And another group using the same software will want a different compiler for the
same reason.

Most HPC cluster will want MPI support. Which is fun to enable in prefix. Do you
go with the OFED stack from prefix or your vendor. Do you even have a choice 
(fortunately the scenario I was in with an old crummy 2.6 kernel is surely gone)?
If you go with your vendor you will have fun tweaking your prefix install.

> 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.

I don’t really care about multilib. The cases where I heard of someone
specifically wanting 32bits on a system defaulting to 64 can be counted
on one finger. Fun ticket that was, especially since they were also looking
at static linking in C++.
I would want multi-abi at the compiler level and more slotting with slot
change in the user environment. That would be a start.

I am sure one individual group or may be several group of people may find
a prefix interesting and even it bringing everything they need. But once
you start to interact with many groups at the national level who want 
completely different things it becomes impossible to fulfil all the
requirements with a single prefix.

There is a political aspect. Because HPC is hard to use, support does a lot
of software install for some standard or hard pieces - or some bits that
are deemed a priority. The other solution is to just give people the compilers
and tell them if you can’t hack it up yourself in your corner you don’t 
belong here.

François

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Fabian Groffen]

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Hi Francois,

On 04-04-2019 07:23:50 +0000, Francois Bissey wrote:
> > On 4/04/2019, at 19:49, Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
[snip]
> > On 04-04-2019 01:51:58 +0000, Francois Bissey wrote:
[snip]
> >> Basically if you want to reproduce some the scenarios managed by spack you
> >> need multiple prefix.
> > 
> > So what scenarios exactly are these?
> 
> It can be several versions of the same software as stated earlier. Either executable
> or libraries.
> For example while gromacs 5.x was stable a user wanted me to resurrect a copy of gromacs
> 3 something because it was the last version with a particular potential in the feature
> set and that’s what they wanted to use.
> You can have the same software compiled with different compilers. Which can be various
> version of gcc/intel compilers or other proprietary compiler (PGI comes to mind as well
> as cray which has its own toolchain). Because of potential incompatibilities in the 
> Fortran binary interface you will have a tree by fortran compiler vendor and sometimes
> different version of the same compiler (gcc 4 to 6, gcc 7 and gcc 8 all have a different
> runtime want to troll bugzilla to see how many problems that created to users?).
> People will want a particular compiler because the software they use compiled with
> another compiler won’t pass the test suite or crash in their particular extreme 
> scenario. And another group using the same software will want a different compiler for the
> same reason.

I see.  The tendency of Gentoo (or: some developers) has been to reduce
slots and concurrent versions.  GCC once had USE=multislot for instance,
Perl used to be slotted.  but I see how there is a wide range of
packages that never were slotted in Gentoo, and/or never will be.
I know there are projects that install "pillars" or something that
truely allow multiple concurrent versions to be installed, because they
use completely different target trees.  Prefix wasn't designed to be
like that, this would require a different approach from Portage itself.

I could see something like stacked prefixes to suit some of the above
use-cases, combined with binpkg support to quickly launch various
different incarnations of combinations of tools.  Nevertheless, there
will be problems.  And Prefix is never going to solve them all :)

Thanks for your explanation, I'm sure there must be some "pain" in even
having to describe the situation ...

Fabian

[snip]

-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

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Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Francois Bissey]

> On 4/04/2019, at 20:44, Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for your explanation, I'm sure there must be some "pain" in even
> having to describe the situation ...
> 
> Fabian

Large HPC system are just a different beast from your regular desktop
or server. There is a high number of people or research groups all
with different requirements.
Trying to satisfy everyone is madness and require extremely flexible
tools. spack, prefix, anaconda, easybuild are all potential tools
for the situation. While spack may be more flexible I won’t pretend
it solve every situations.

Now for some packager comic relief if you haven’t seen it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSemlYagjIU&t=29s

François

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hi François,

> On 3 Apr 2019, at 22:51, Francois Bissey <francois.bissey@canterbury.ac.nz> 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.
> 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.

This scenario is exactly what I was proposing in the HSF packaging meetings, to
have a base userland installed with portage on top of which one could manage
the end user applications with spack if need be, or nix, or any other tool.

I think stacked prefix can solve a good part of the combinatorial use case that
spack was created for, but for now the best solution for such cases is probably
a combination of prefix and another package manager aimed at combinatorial installs.
But an overlay with slotted scientific packages could also be interesting to explore
(i.e. the slot could be used to just adjust the prefix to $EPREFIX/lib/<pkg>/<version>).
That would probably work well enough for gromacs and other similar tools.

Cheers,
-Guilherme

> 
> François
> 
>> On 4/04/2019, at 07:57, Guilherme Amadio <amadio@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Jon,
>> 
>>> On 3 Apr 2019, at 12:56, Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> 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
> 

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Benda Xu]

Guilherme Amadio <amadio@gentoo.org> writes:

> 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.

Thank you Guilherme!  Just to point out that our keyword is named
"amd64" instead of "x86_64".

Yours,
Benda

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Benda Xu]

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Hi Fabian,

Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org> writes:

> I could see something like stacked prefixes to suit some of the above
> use-cases, combined with binpkg support to quickly launch various
> different incarnations of combinations of tools.  Nevertheless, there
> will be problems.  And Prefix is never going to solve them all :)

I was just about to say that.  The recent development of stacked
prefixes could produce very thin provisioned sub-Prefix to install the
completely different versioned sets of ebuilds, which would fulfill
spack's feature of version full-combinations.

Yours,
Benda

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Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hi Benda,

> On 4 Apr 2019, at 09:04, Benda Xu <heroxbd@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> Guilherme Amadio <amadio@gentoo.org> writes:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Thank you Guilherme!  Just to point out that our keyword is named
> "amd64" instead of "x86_64”.

Of course! I feel embarrassed now for getting that wrong!

Cheers,
-Guilherme

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

I'll give my final thoughts on this, because I knew it was political, and
there's already tons of traction in *Spack*:

On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 01:51:58AM +0000, Francois Bissey wrote:
> 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.

So, what *could* have happened was that the HPC community did due diligence, and
said, "hmm, what's this portage thing? it's like BSD ports, etc." and extended
it for the HPC use cases. What I see time and time again, is that the HPC
community reinvents something that exists rather than joining an existing
community and making it better. Why do they isolate themselves? I won't go
into my suspected reasons, but it's stupid, because there's so much "not
invented here" problems that go on in supercomputing.

Also, I think portage *can* fill all of the use cases of *Spack*, but it's not
done in the way *Spack* presents it. I personally think that providing build
configuration on the command line is a bad way to do it, like *Spack* does, and
it should be encoded in overlays and/or site specific portage configuration
files. Though, I don't know if there's something equivalent to *make.conf*, et
al., I don't know Spack well enough.

Also, yes, I get that multi-compiler issues that we have in HPC is a strange
requirement that we have, but again, *portage* could have solved it if the
HPC community had contributed -- and I don't think it's impossible with
current *portage*. I do realize you can't use *Prefix* out of the box with
the existing *portage* tree.

I haven't given it a ton of thought of how to solve it, but we ought to be
doing static linking anwyays, because shared linking is hell in a supercomputer
center for all of the aforementioned reasons of needing lots of different user
requirements.

So, I can't turn back time and tell the *Spack* team to go and use *portage*,
because it exists now, and it has a lot of traction, but I am going to say it
was a stupid decision.

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

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[gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Benda Xu]

Hi Jon,

Jon Woodring <woodring@lanl.gov> writes:

> Also, yes, I get that multi-compiler issues that we have in HPC is a strange
> requirement that we have, but again, *portage* could have solved it if the
> HPC community had contributed -- and I don't think it's impossible with
> current *portage*.

Thank you Jon.  You are always welcomed to try Prefix out on the HPC
settings.

> I do realize you can't use *Prefix* out of the box with the existing
> *portage* tree.

That is not the case.  You can use Prefix from the Gentoo portage tree
without modification, over Linux kernels. The overlays Amadio mentioned
were for development purpose.

> So, I can't turn back time and tell the *Spack* team to go and use *portage*,
> because it exists now, and it has a lot of traction, but I am going to say it
> was a stupid decision.

One of our friends Christoph Junghans, was a contributor of Prefix.  But
eventually he decided that spack is the way to go.  Jon, it might be
worthwhile to have a chat with your colleague on this matter.  Chris
knows both sides well.

Cheers,
Benda

Re: [gentoo-alt] Re: [PREFIX] Bootstrap stable?

[Jon Woodring]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2019 at 08:27:01AM +0800, Benda Xu wrote:

> That is not the case. You can use Prefix from the Gentoo portage tree
> without modification, over Linux kernels. The overlays Amadio
> mentioned were for development purpose.

Sorry, I should be more specific; I meant the way we want to use it in
HPC, with crazy compiler and linking configurations. I have had no
problems with Prefix so far, but I am considering how I want to use it.
So, thanks for your work on it.

> One of our friends Christoph Junghans, was a contributor of Prefix.
> But eventually he decided that spack is the way to go. Jon, it might
> be worthwhile to have a chat with your colleague on this matter. Chris
> knows both sides well.

Yes, I know Christoph well, but it would be wasted effort as I'm not
looking to convince someone away from Spack. Sides have been picked and
people are going to stick with their team. The only thing that works is
marketing and propaganda because technical arguments never work.