Re: Any input for some talk about usage of Debian in HPC
Hi,
On Mon, May 27, 2024 at 8:55 PM Peter Wienemann <fossdev@posteo.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Fred,
>
> On 2024-05-27 14:41:22, PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel wrote:
> >> 2. They are thinking about building up a credible alternative to
> >> RHEL/AlmaLinux to decrease vendor dependence (see slides 12 to 14).
> >> Concerning this second point they stress that it still lacks management
> >> approval.
> >
> > Do you know if the CERN will officially put some man power in official Debian packaging of there software? (ROOT, geant4, etc...)
>
> I don't know. But there are a few open ITP bugs for some of their
> software packages, e. g.
The Geant4 and ROOT work I did privately, and right now I don't
actively work on those ITPs. At least on the ROOT I know they are
interested, but they have other priorities given that ROOT is
notoriously hard to package (huge monorepo with external deps,
complicated build script, modified embedded clang, legacy names like
"libCore.so" et al). I don't think Geant4 has any man-power to spare,
and it also has their own packaging challenges (requires huge datasets
to actually work).
It is worth mentioning that CERN's software group for scientific
software (mainly ROOT, Geant4 and cvmfs) are an entirely different
department than CERN IT. If they move more machines to Debian I doubt
we will see upstream packaging as a result, most likely they will just
incorporate it better in cvmfs.
Cheers,
Stephan
PS: these are just my 2 cents, I haven't been in contact with the
software people there since the RHEL debacle
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