effis and spack-installed executables

[germasch]

While I'm at it, here's another observation: Adapting a sample effis yaml file to use one's own spack-installed executables is cumbersome.

I don't think there's any real simple solution, in particular given that one may have multiple installs around. But one thing that'd help is if one could do something like

executable_path: $(spack location-i gene)

in the yaml file (maybe yaml itself already allows something like that -- I don't know.)

Similarly, it'd be nice if one could use $MEMBERWORK or something when specifying the run dir.

And, what, there's more ;) Instead of having to change the run dir manually, it'd also be nice if there were an option to say run_dir_base=/path/to, and effis made a new subdirectory every time you run effis-compose. (This is just an idea I just had, I haven't thought about it in detail, so there may be issues with it, but in particular during debugging it often happens that I'll submit one job after the other...)

[suchyta1]

@germasch I agree on all this.

executable_path:` $(spack location-i gene)

Another options would be that If I make EFFIS aware of a spack installation, it should be able to find the executable by variants like spack does itself. But that's less general than a shell command.

Instead of having to change the run dir manually, it'd also be nice if there were an option to say run_dir_base=/path/to, and effis made a new subdirectory every time you run effis-compose. (This is just an idea I just had, I haven't thought about it in detail, so there may be issues with it, but in particular during debugging it often happens that I'll submit one job after the other...)

Scott was thinking along these lines too. I don't think a basic implementation is difficult, and I can definitely sympathize on how it'd be nice in debugging :)

[bd4]

A third option for executable_path would be to resolve relative executable names. It could first look for an exe in CWD, and if that is not found, search PATH. This would be very generic and not require knowing about a spack install.

Re run directory, having effis-compose.py print out the run directory it just created would be easy to add and very helpful. Then I can copy and cd to it, or set it to an env var.