***rekado_ is now known as rekado
<civodul>the "Tier 1" and "Tier 2" supercomputer folks in .fr: first one says they use Spack to generate modules, second one says they do things by hand but plan to use Spack and also generate containers with it (?) <zimoun>civodul: right! On the other hand, they is Modulefiles main developper. :-) <civodul>right, but speaking on behalf of the Tier 1 supercomp, so... <civodul>but we need to think about what we're doing wrong compared to Spack (& CONDA) <civodul>i think communication and training is one thing <civodul>then there's lack of political support (not necessarily "our" fault, but...) <zimoun>Political support? I remember the Cyclades projects. ;-) <rekado>AFAIK Spack has just dedicated advertising people everywhere <rekado>they are at all conferences that matter <rekado>even our HPC admins who hadn’t even heard of modules (!) heard of Spack at one of those hot air conferences <rekado>another thing they do that we don’t: they don’t mention drawbacks <rekado>I haven’t seen any Spack presentation that talked about alternatives, limitations, future work, etc <rekado>maybe it’s because I haven’t seen much, but their advertising material comes across as just a tad arrogant <rekado>I think we’ve been doing very well in absorbing Docker and Singularity with “guix pack” <rekado>our messaging here is effective: these container images are just lower level representations of our much more maintainable and transparent graph <rekado>and just yesterday even one of our least technical users at the MDC used “guix pack” for a publication to let the overwhelmed reviewers use their Docker thing <rekado>(the reviewers said: could you, like, maybe use Conda instead of this SCM stuff? Because you can use Conda in Docker, you know.) <rekado>(“SCM” capitalized, because it’s the new “GUIX”, I’m sure) <rekado>however: our messaging wrt Spack and Conda is much less clear <rekado>is Guix an alternative to these that gives you just a bit more “reproducibility” in edge case but is also harder to install because of that daemon and root and all that? <rekado>I heard claims from that one prolific Galaxy dude that Conda gets you 99% of the reproducibility you need <rekado>and like 74.3% of all statistics that one was also made up on the spot <rekado>that was at a bioinfo conference, right before my talk <rekado>remember the idea of The Irreproducible Paper? Maybe it’s time for that. <rekado>so it generates an ugly Dockerfile from your current environment? <rekado>we could do that – but does anyone really want that? <rekado>perhaps they do; people like to have a magic snapshot/capture button that does what they mean <civodul>isn't our "advertising material" (perceived as) arrogant too? :-) <rekado>your presentations always include limitations, open issues, etc <civodul>but yeah, i think you're write: Guix vs. containers is becoming quite "well" understood <civodul>but in HPC/"science", i think network effect is super important <civodul>bioinfo people use CONDA because bioinfo people use it <civodul>HPC (of the linear algebra/numerical simulation kind) people use Spack likewise <rekado>if Guix could output Conda recipes – would that help or be self-defeating? <civodul>producing container images has a direct benefit <rekado>Conda is kinda useless on its own :) <civodul>but people already have conda packages, no? <civodul>what might help for the HPC folks is module files <civodul>for instance, in that big thread, there were admins explaining they use Spack to generate module files, period <zimoun>I was using Conda in PDE/Linear Algebra stuff before because it was super easy to get a Python environment (Scipy & co.) and easy to share. But it was before I see the light. :-) <zimoun>One really cool feature Guix provide is: “guix pack -f docker” and then the Docker image contains the profile/manifest so even this opaque blob is not and one can reproduce it without the initial Guix material <zimoun>“docker export” to tarball and then it is easy to extract the profile/manifest. <zimoun>The missing piece is a converter from profile/manifest to manifest.scm+channels.scm <civodul>yeah, people asked me about that again recently <civodul>it's getting higher in my to-do list :-) <zimoun>yesterday, I have started a tiny script to do so. <zimoun>But my TODO list is a bit to big. :-) <zimoun>Well IMHO, (wider) communication on topic that Guix can do (easily) that other tools. And one thing is (re)generate Docker images without Dockerfile.