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

[Graeme.Winter at Diamond.ac.uk]

Been running with modules at a facility I work at for ~ 15 years - it’s clunky, prehistoric and still works just fine. May have to dig out your old tcl manuals mind. 

The fact that it is built around tcl does mean you can do scripting etc. which is very useful. 

Suspect there are better modern alternatives, but this works and is also relatively easy to automate for e.g. updating module files as versioning is flexible and trivial 

Cheers Graeme

> On 20 Aug 2019, at 18:47, Fred Youhanaie <fly at anydata.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> I think modules can help here - http://modules.sourceforge.net/
> 
> This is usually packaged as "environment-modules" under most distros.
> 
> Typically you would set up small config files for each package/version. In the file you normally "prepend" the package directory to PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Fred
> 
> On 20/08/2019 18:11, David Mathog 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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