4 ms·

> like the lack of certain kinds of configuration isolation by default could you please explain a little what kind of "configuration isolation" you mean? > an

> like the lack of certain kinds of configuration isolation by default could you please explain a little what kind of "configuration isolation" you mean? > and the general difficulty of configuring certain kinds of things like what for example?

eslaught 4y ago
> could you please explain a little what kind of "configuration isolation" you mean? It's been a while so I don't have the whole list off the top of my head, but there are several configuration files that live in $HOME by default unless you set SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG=1. Those files can e.g., list compilers and software packages, if I recall, among various other settings. > like what for example? I was trying to follow someone's recipe for building something with Spack. I hit some sort of compiler error (sorry, it's been too long, don't remember). And the solution they suggested was to modify compilers.yml by hand to set various things. (Something about setting the right paths for using Cray's compiler wrappers with rocmcc...) That and I had to fuss with packages.yml to configure the system MPI. I remember trying to figure out how use "spack config set" to configure these files automatically, but the syntax was (a) completely undocumented and (b) not actually powerful enough in practice to configure either of those files. So I gave up on that, set SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG and just saved the modified yaml files into my repository so that I can at least recover my settings if I need them in the future. For advanced use cases, it seems like you basically need to modify these yaml files to get anything done, but the amount of documentation and support for doing this automatically is really lacking. (And the idea that you're supposed to require every user to do this manually is even more insane.)

4 ms·

> like the lack of certain kinds of configuration isolation by default could you please explain a little what kind of "configuration isolation" you mean? > an

by EntrePrescott 4y ago

eslaught 4y ago
> could you please explain a little what kind of "configuration isolation" you mean? It's been a while so I don't have the whole list off the top of my head, but there are several configuration files that live in $HOME by default unless you set SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG=1. Those files can e.g., list compilers and software packages, if I recall, among various other settings. > like what for example? I was trying to follow someone's recipe for building something with Spack. I hit some sort of compiler error (sorry, it's been too long, don't remember). And the solution they suggested was to modify compilers.yml by hand to set various things. (Something about setting the right paths for using Cray's compiler wrappers with rocmcc...) That and I had to fuss with packages.yml to configure the system MPI. I remember trying to figure out how use "spack config set" to configure these files automatically, but the syntax was (a) completely undocumented and (b) not actually powerful enough in practice to configure either of those files. So I gave up on that, set SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG and just saved the modified yaml files into my repository so that I can at least recover my settings if I need them in the future. For advanced use cases, it seems like you basically need to modify these yaml files to get anything done, but the amount of documentation and support for doing this automatically is really lacking. (And the idea that you're supposed to require every user to do this manually is even more insane.)