Hi,
Long story short (see long story below), I want to deliver and install a SPANK plugin along with a tool of mine. Does it seem reasonable to deliver an rpm who's install builds that plugin and automatically edits the plug stack configuration file to enable the plugin? Thanks, Bob ------------------- Long Story ---------------- I have written a SPANK plugin for srun. Its purpose is to automatically launch a debugging tool whenever srun starts up a multi-process, parallel programming application, on Cray systems. At this point I am exploring ways to deliver the plugin. Has anyone come up with something they find satisfying? When the dust settles, the debug tool and the plugin needs to have been installed on the system and a plug stack configuration file needs to have a line that points at the plugin (a DSO). Our customers pull down the various tools as rpm packages and a generic script uses rpm to install the latest batch of tools. This gets the tool installed. Assuming that an rpm was built for each major SLURM release, a binary plugin could be part of the debug tool package. The tool is put in a default location, though users could override that location. An admin would make sure that the plug stack configuration file existed and add a line to point at the default (or overridden) location. There are a number of things that are clunky and unsatisfying about what I outlined above. Needing to have an rpm for each major SLURM release seems like overkill. My tools have never needed such in the past. The plugin is quite simple. A glorified hello world with a fork/exec. I am using very little of the SPANK API. It is pretty easy for me to imagine the my plugin could be backwards compatible to older versions of SLURM and the most recent could always be used. (Perhaps I am naive about what the future holds...). Addressing the need to recompile with each major release of SLURM could be handled by having my rpm install, trigger a compile and link of this simple plugin. The only thing that might be tricky is finding spank.h. Burdening the admin with the edit of the plug stack configuration file is another clunky item. I believe it could be a one time event, at most once per SLURM update, or even a zero times event. The admin would be able to put in a location/name that is a constant from release to release of the tool (again, using the most recent plugin). Even cleaner, for the admin, would be for the rpm install to create the file, if absent, adding or modifying the need line if necessary. Updating to new releases of SLURM would probably destroy the plug stack configuration file, breaking the plugin until a new tool install occurred. This breakage won't be immediately obvious and the extra awareness and work for the admin is unfortunate. Personally, I wish that installing a new release of SLURM promoted any existing plug stack configuration file, thereby avoiding this problem. Does anyone know if it does this? I also wish that the plug stack configuration file existed from the initial SLURM build/install with identifier and format comments and a commented out example line, but otherwise empty. -- Bob Moench Voice: (651) 605-9034 Programming Environment -- Debugger Dev. FAX: (651) 605-8972 Cray Inc. 380 Jackson St. Suite 210 Email: [email protected] St. Paul, MN 55101 URL: http://www.cray.com/
