Description
Software development in high energy physics follows the open-source
software (OSS) approach and relies heavily on software being developed
outside the field. Creating a consistent and working stack out of 100s
of external, interdependent packages on a variety of platforms is a
non-trivial task. Within HEP, multiple technical solutions exist to
configure and build those stacks (so-called build tools). Furthermore,
quite often software has to be ported to
new platforms and operating systems and subsequently patches to the
individual externals need to be created. This is a manual and time
consuming task, requiring a very special kind of expert
knowledge. None of this work is experiment-specific. For this reason,
the HEP Software Foundation (HSF) packaging working group evaluated
various HEP and non-HEP tools and identified the HPC tool “spack” as
a very promising candidate for a common experiment-independent
build tool. This contribution summarizes the build tool evaluations,
presents the first experience with using spack in HEP, the required
extensions to it, and discusses its potential for HEP-wide adoption.
| Primary Keyword (Mandatory) | Software development process and tools |
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