Conference call notes 20251008 - easybuilders/easybuild GitHub Wiki

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Notes on the 280th EasyBuild conference call, Wednesday 8 Oct 2025 (08:00 UTC / 10:00 CEST)

Attendees

List of attendees (21):

  • Sebastian Achilles (JSC, Germany)
  • Xavier Besseron (LuxProvide, Luxembourg)
  • Simon Branford (Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
  • Bob Dröge (Univ. of Groningen, The Netherlands)
  • Jorge Delgado Guerrero (University of Luxembourg)
  • Alex Domingo (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
  • Loris Ercole (CECAM)
  • Davide Grassano (CECAM)
  • Alexander Grund (ZIH, Dresden, Germany)
  • Leonardo Honfi Camilo (Wageningen University, The Netherlands)
  • Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent, Belgium)
  • Georgios Kafanas (University of Luxembourg)
  • Kurt Lust (UAntwerpen / LUMI)
  • Sébastien Moretti (SIB, Switzerland)
  • Alan O'Cais (freelancer)
  • Jure Pečar (EMBL, Germany)
  • Andrea Piserchia (E4)
  • Åke Sandgren (Umeå University, Sweden)
  • Jörg Saßmannshausen (Imperial College London, UK)
  • Cintia Willemyns (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
  • Alain van Hoof (TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands)

Agenda

  • overview of recent developments
  • update of common toolchains
  • Q&A

Recent developments

  • latest EasyBuild release: EasyBuild v5.1.2 (26 Sept 2025)
  • next (stable) EasyBuild release: EasyBuid v5.2.0 (ETA: end of Oct'25)
    • incl. support for LLVM-based toolchain, NVHPC toolchain, etc.

News

  • Save the date: 11th EasyBuild User Meeting (EUM'26)
    • Tue-Thu 21-23 April 2026 in Guimarães (Portugal), home of Deucalion EuroHPC system
    • co-organised with MACC (EuroHPC Hosting Entity)
    • More information via https://easybuild.io/eum26
    • Suggestions for talks/sessions are welcome!

Merge sprints

  • future easyconfigs merge sprints planned:
    • Mon 13 Oct 2025
    • Mon 15 Dec 2025
    • Mon 16 Feb 2026
    • aiming for semi-fixed schedule every other month: 3rd Monday in even months

Merged PRs

(changed made in PRs marked with * are included latest EasyBuild stable release)

  • blog/docs (merged PRs)

    • ...

  • framework (merged PRs)

    • bug fixes
      • update build_and_install_one function to take into account that application log file may not exists (PR #5004)
    • enhancements
      • Take into account alternative name post_install_patches when checking checksums (PR #5017)
    • changes
      • ...
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • CI/test suite
      • ...

  • easyblocks (merged PRs)

    • bug fixes
      • tweak LLVM easyblock to only run dynamic linker check if clang is being built (PR #3952)
    • enhancements
      • enhance LAMMPS easyblock to make it possible to overide kokkos_arch for GENERIC ARM target (PRs #3943 + #3945)
    • updates
      • ...
    • changes
      • ...
    • new
      • ...
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • CI
      • ...

  • easyconfigs (merged PRs)

    • ~XXX easyconfig PRs were merged since last conf call
    • bug fixes/reports
      • ...
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • (noteworthy) new software
      • ...
    • noteworthy software updates
      • ...
    • cleanup
      • ...
    • changes
      • ...

Open (active) PRs

  • blog/docs (open PRs + issues)

  • framework (open PRs + issues)

    • bugs
      • Make sure cached easyconfigs don't get modifed (PR #4818)
      • RPATH wrappers may be ignored if /tmp is mounted with /noexec (issue #4910)
    • enhancements
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • changes
      • Deprecate support for running EasyBuild with Python < 3.9 (PR #4966)
        • you can control the Python command to use by setting $EB_PYTHON
          • export EB_PYTHON=python3.9
        • if you install EasyBuild with EasyBuild, you should make sure that was installed with this Python version
        • some EasyBuild features only work when using Python 3.9+
        • => opportunity for having some proper documentation on this
      • Make command environment of shell commands more discoverable in the log (PR #4999)
      • Don't show command string again when showing in which folder it runs (PR #5003)
      • Remove escaping when converting EasyBuildError to a string (PR #5009)
    • tests
      • also with test Python 3.14 (WIP PR #4992)
        • Python 3.14 was released yesterday (7 Oct'25)
        • only 1 failing test in test_download_file
      • Replace assertErrorRegex by standard assertRaisesRegex (PR #5010)
      • Fix test_gitrepo in case global Git configuration is not in place (PR #5013)
      • Introduce saved_env context manager for restoring environment in tests (PR #5015)
      • Add decorator to ignore PR test failures due to rate limit (PR #5019)

  • easyblocks (open PRs + issues)

    • bug fixes/reports
      • ensure all versioned symlinks are created for bzip2 (PR #3948) -library name conflicts between BLIS and single-threaded AOCL-BLAS (issue #3949)
        • rename AOCL-BLAS to BLIS with -AOCL-BLAS versionsuffix to prevent having both loaded?
        • renaming libraries provided by AOCL-BLAS to not use libblis.so
      • numpy easyblock not adhering to parallel option for all build sections for numpy 5.1.2 (issue #3950)
    • enhancements
      • Add test for PyTorch test-results (XML files) parsing (PR #3803)
      • add dummy minor version to default CUDA version in NVHPC if not present (PR #3924)
      • enhance PythonPackage easyblock to error out when only build-options are given for pip-based Python package installation (PR #3925)
      • use clean_dir instead of remove_dir on installation directory in various easyblocks (PRs #3926, #3927, #3928, #3929, #3930, #3931, #3932, #3933, #3934, #3935)
      • add -DCACHE_SECTOR_SIZE_READONLY to when building BLIS for A64FX (PR #3938)
    • updates
      • Update CP2K easyblock for v2024 and v2025 (PR #3892)
      • Update LAMMPS easyblock: v2025 fix + extra tests (PR #3894)
      • Update jaxlib easyblock for jax 0.6.2 with CUDA-12.6.0 (PR #3951)
    • changes
      • change LLVM EasyBlock to not apply concurrency workaround for pre-release LLVM 20 (PR #3937)
    • code cleanup
      • ...
    • new easyblocks
      • ...

  • easyconfigs (open PRs + issues)

    • bug fixes/reports
      • add patch for FlexiBLAS v3.3.1 to disable -ftree-vectorize for netlib LAPACK (PR #23974)
        • only relevant on recent AMD systems (Genoa/Zen4 or Turin/Zen5), for relatively old toolchains (foss/2023a + foss/2023b)
        • fix for GCC found by Bart Oldeman, so patching GCC to fix this is a better approach...
    • enhancements
      • ...
    • (noteworthy) new software
      • ...
    • software updates
    • changes
      • use generic version of RAxML v8.2.13 as dependency for bcgTree and Parsnp (PR #23975)
        • old easyblock PR by Alex that picks correct Makefile based on what host CPU supports

Common toolchains

2026a

  • ETA early 2026
  • will likely use GCC 15.x as base...

Q&A / other

  • (Alex) Graphviz with & without -minimal versionsuffix
    • was done to avoid requiring full Graphviz as dependency for MUST
      • to avoid Qt6
    • will cause conflicts if minimal variant is picked up more
    • should we use Graphviz-minimal instead to avoid name clash?
    • should libraries provided by minimal variants be renamed?
    • should we discourage this approach just to save some build time?
      • should only be used for build deps
    • centrally we should not introduce "minimal" variants like this
      • let sites use hook to switch to minimal variant
    • base installation (Graphviz-base) and full Graphviz on top?
      • unclear if that's possible
      • full pkg can shadow what's provided in the base package
      • ordering of loading then determines what's picked up
    • how to enforce the policy on this?
    • => Alex: propose clear policy on this
  • (Jurij) perfect 10 CVE for Redis
  • (Jörg) easyconfig PR #24060 for BLAST+
    • more dependencies being added
    • => should remove --without-perl and just include Perl dependency, since it's easy and our general policy is to provide "fat" feature-rich installations of software