[Neurodebian-users] NeuroFedora packaging priorities

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

On Sun, 18 Nov 2018, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

>> TLDR; Debian may be awesome, but RHEL is also awesome ;-)
>
> Sorry, I might be missing something -- does RHEL now provide a rich set 
> of neuroscience related python (and not only) packages?

It depends on how you define "provides"; RHEL certainly does not provide 
them in form of pre-built binaries for the OS-level package management 
system (rpm).

My argument was, however, that managing pure Python dependencies is 
trivial for anyone who has a clue, and it's mostly Python packages that 
depend upon evil native stuff that are a bit more challenging to deal 
with... this challenge is also far from being insurmountable though, see 
the rest of the rant mentioning gsrc.

On top of that, specifically in the HPC context, I used to make my own 
NumPy / SciPy builds with icc against MKL anyways to squeeze every last 2% 
performance out of my CPUs, not even speaking of MPI stuff. If you are 
routinely running simulations that take 1 000 000 CPU hours, some 20 000 
hours do make a difference... so no way I would have used distro packages 
built to work on a wide range of CPUs, and thus not exploiting latest 
instruction set extensions.

Anyways, that being sad, I was happily using (Neuro)Debian stuff for 
introductory courses, where performance didn't play a role, while 
convenience & unification meant that one could focus on course material 
instead of teaching SysAdmin 101 to a herd of biology fresh(wo)men.

>> I just used gsrc (which is pretty crazy, but equally awesome... today I 
>> maybe would have picked some nix-like stuff...
>
> don't you need some kind of a root "daemon" to make use of guix/nix ?

Nope, not at all:

   $ nix run --store ~/nix nixpkgs.nix nixpkgs.bashInteractive

This will create an user-owned nix store, which does not require root 
privileges, and spawn a shell where this store will be mounted to /nix.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev