Re: [HTCondor-users] Preferred htcss installation method

[Greg Thain <gthain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/24/24 05:08, Matthew T West via HTCondor-users wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Why is the projects preferred installation method via compiled 
> binaries rather than building from source? Not saying I disapprove, as 
> working with an .rpm repo makes my life easier but so many other 
> research computing projects expect one to build from source. "I am 
> able to pick up bug fixes faster if I recompile source" is a common 
> response.

Hi Matt:

I think you answered your own question, there, "because it makes your 
life easier" :-)

But it is an interesting question. HTCondor is certainly open source, 
everything we ship is on github, and anyone can see all our development 
and changes in real time as they get pushed to the repository. We know 
of several large users who do compile from source, for one reason or 
another, but it is the minority.

Wrt bug fixes, we try to push bug fix releases out as soon as we can. 
For critical bug fixes to the stable release, we can get a new release 
out often in a week or so.

We do take some pride in trying to ship a reliable system, which means 
that we build and run our regression test suite on 17 different 
platforms on every commit. (More platforms than we ship). We then ship 
these same binaries, which gives us somewhat more confidence that they 
will work out of the box on your system. When we ship source, we don't 
know which compiler version, which compiler flags, what versions of what 
library, what build configuration, etc. you may have used. While we 
hope minor changes like that wouldn't break the software, everyone on 
this list should have a good understanding of the nature of software, 
and how seemingly unrelated changes can cause unexpected problems.

Now, building and shipping and maintaining the native packages is (for 
me) a surprising amount of work. Not just learning the ins and outs of 
rpmbuild and similar systems, but also it forces us to work with the 
distro people, to ensure that our decisions are in harmony with the rest 
of the distribution. The distro folks have a different view and scope 
than we do, so we appreciate their perspective, and I think this results 
in better HTCondor code in the long run.

> I am just curious about the htcondor teams mindset about this.

But, at the end of the day, we respond to what the users need, and 
native packages are what we get the most requests for. If, by some 
miracle, all large-scale computing users mystically switched all of 
their systems to running on RISC-V using the VMS operating system, well, 
we'd follow there.

> Again not complaining, just curious. 


Always like talking shop,


-greg