[lsst-dm-stack-users] Feedback on preparing a relocatable binary distribution of the stack

[Mario Juric]

On 9/24/14 7:01 , Fabio Hernandez wrote:
> 

Hi Fabio,
	Good work, thanks!

> 3) The eupspkg file for some of the packages installed are symbolic
> links which point to $LSST_HOME/eups/lib/eupspkg.sh. For some other
> packages, it is not a symbolic link but a copy of the same file. My
> understanding is that this is not relevant at execution time, but I
> found curious that not all packages are similar in that respect. For
> instance, mysqlclient package uses a symbolic link whereas skypix does
> not. Again, the symbolic links point to the absolute path of
> the $LSST_HOME/eups/lib/eupspkg.sh script. From my test, it is not
> necessary to relocate these symbolic links for the stack to execute
> correctly, but I mention this feature in case it may be the symptom of
> something not intended.
> 

You're right that eupspkg.sh doesn't matter at runtime.

Regarding why it's sometimes a link and sometimes not, I suspect it's
due to the way the ups/ directory gets copied to the final destination.
My guess is that skypix (built using scons) does the copy in a way that
ignores symlinks, while mysqlclient (built by autoconf/automake) does
the equivalent of 'cp -a'.

> 
> I hope this feedback may help other people with similar goals. I'm
> certainly interested in the feedback that the LSST stack experts would
> provide. I also volunteer to help modifying the shell scripts to
> implement my proposed modifications and 1) and 2). If the developers are
> interested in a contribution on this, please let me know how to proceed.
> 

Definitely interested!

There are two ways to do this:

a) If you have access to our git repositories and Jira (I think you do),
open a JIRA ticket describing the enhancement, create the corresponding
branch (e.g., tickets/DM-1234), implement the change there, and then
send it to be reviewed (I propose Frossie Economou as the reviewer).

b) If you don't have write access to our git repos, fork the
repositories you need on github, and send us a pull request. If you
require changing EUPS, you'll need to fork it on github anyway.

Good work, thanks!
-- 
Mario Juric,
UW Astronomy Faculty | UW eScience | LSST DM Project Scientist
Web : http://research.majuric.org      Phone : +1 609 933 1033