[Beowulf] software for activating one of many programs but not the others?

[Ryan Novosielski]

Really sounds like you should be using environment modules. What I’d recommend to anyone starting out today would be Lmod: https://lmod.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Most of the software building/installation packages interface with it.

Generally the software installs are done into a place that’s unique for each package and version, and maybe even for what compiler it was built with (see hierarchical).

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||_// the State	 |         Ryan Novosielski - novosirj at rutgers.edu
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||  \\    of NJ	 | Office of Advanced Research Computing - MSB C630, Newark
     `'

> On Aug 20, 2019, at 1:11 PM, David Mathog <mathog at caltech.edu> wrote:
> 
> On a system I am setting up there are a very large number of different software packages available.  The sources live in /usr/local/src and a small number of the most commonly used ones are installed in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib and so forth.  The issue is that any of the target end users will only want a couple of these.  If they were all fully installed into /usr/local there would be some name conflicts.  They may also be bringing some of their own versions of these, and while $PATH order can help there, it would be best to avoid those possible conflicts too.  Users don't have priv's to modify /usr/local, so they cannot install/uninstall there themselves.
> 
> So I'm looking for something like
> 
>  setup software_name install
>  setup software_name remove
> 
> which would install/uninstall the packages (perhaps by symlinks) from
> 
>  /usr/local/src/software_name
> 
> under the user's home directory.  The goal is that the setup scripts NOT be constructed by hand.  It would have a
> 
>  setup software_name install
> 
> which would emulate a:
> 
>  make install
> 
> and automatically translate it into the appropriate setup commands.  Some of these packages have hundreds of programs, so anything manual is going to be very
> painful.
> 
> Anybody seen a piece of software like this?
> 
> I don't expect this to work in all cases.  Some of these packages hard code paths into the binaries and/or scripts.  The only hope for them is for the user to do some variant of:
> 
>    cd $HOMEDIR
>    (cd /usr/local/src; tar -cf - software_name) | tar -xf -
>    cd software_name
>    make clean  #pray that it gets everything!!!
>    ./configure --prefix=$HOMEDIR
>    make
>    make install
> 
> There is a file which documents how to build each package, although it is nowhere near complete at this time.
> 
> Docker is already available if the user wants to go that route, which avoids this whole issue, but at the cost of moving big images around.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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