[Debian-med-packaging] environment modules for Debian Med (was: samtools i386-buildable)

[Kevin Murray]

Hi all,

On 06:42 16/09, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> On الأربعاء 16 أيلول 2015 06:02, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > I confirm that modules came up in some past discussion on Debian Med
> > sprints (?) and also recently in Debian Science BoF.  I'd be happy if
> > somebody would investigate some time into this and makes some proposal
> > how *exactly* we could use it for our purpose.
> >  
> 
> +1 for environment modules. I wanted to bring this up for a long time (I
> didn't know it's been suggested before). It might be better brought up
> on -devel since this is something that can help Debian as a whole, in my
> opinion.
> 
> I may volunteer to consider its implementation. I just have several
> packages I'm trying to create and I still need to update you all on the
> automatic backports system.
> 

I'm in the process of setting up a ~1000 core bioinformatics cluster which will
use environment modules quite heavily. I'd be keen for obvious reasons to see
this happen, and am happy to lend a hand.

One initial thought: Would it be possible to hack a .deb-to-module converter?
Or even implement something like dh_environment_modules, which works with a
file similar to debian/<pkg>.install but auto-creates a module file adding the
relevant paths to the environment? That would take a lot of tedious boilerplate
away from the creation of modules, and free up sysadmin time (in my case, to
work on Debian :]).

I particularly see this as important with packages (like samtools) with a good
reason to have two stable versions on one system (many tools/people still rely
on samtools < 1.0). GCC is another example of this, but probably a little out
of scope initially.

We could even (and I'm not sure how Debian policy compliant this is) turn
packages like samtools into a virtual package, requiring at least one of
samtools-1.x or samtools-0.x, and install module files with each of the real
packages. Just thinking out loud here :).

Cheers,
Kevin

---
Kevin Murray

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