Minimum supported Lmod Version - EasyBuild 5

[branfosj]

Work has started on EasyBuild 5 and we, the EasyBuild maintainers, are requesting community feedback on some potential changes. If you will be impacted by this proposed change then please leave feedback below.

Proposed Change

Change the minimum supported Lmod version to be 7.

This proposed change only relates to supported Lmod version. No change is proposed for support of other module tools.

Background

Lmod 6 is old - the most recent release being several years ago. Use of Lmod 6 is deprecated in EasyBuild and the intention is to remove support in EasyBuild 5.

Benefits

• Motivate community to adopt Lmod 8.x
• Makes the change notified by the current deprecation warning
• Simplify CI test configurations

Drawbacks

• Ubuntu / Debian Lmod 6.x
  • Lmod packages available via https://github.com/surak/Lmod
  • Not every EasyBuild user is able to install updated packages
• This will not produce significant code simplification

[boegel]

My 2 cents: maybe we should even consider requiring Lmod 8.x - I see no reason for keeping support for Lmod 7 if we won't support Lmod 6 anymore (both are old enough to be basically irrelevant now) - although I may be overlooking something.

In addition, we probably should consider also removing support for some ancient Environment Modules versions that nobody is using anymore - in particular the EnvironmentModulesTcl class that supports the ancient Tcl-only implementation (which predates even the 3.x Tcl/C implementation, cfr. https://github.com/cea-hpc/modules/blob/main/NEWS.rst#modules-tcl-1923-2017-07-20).
Note that the modern Tcl-only 4.x implementation is supported via the EnvironmentModules class.

We may need to keep the support for 3.x Tcl/C implementation (EnvironmentModulesC class) though, I suspect that's still used in the wild quite a bit, despite the last release dating from 2012-12-20 (cfr. https://sourceforge.net/projects/modules/files/Modules/modules-3.2.10/).
The last EasyBuild survey (2022) shows that we were still around 10% usage there (same ballpark as Lmod 6.x, but still the most used Tcl-based implementation).

[branfosj]

My 2 cents: maybe we should even consider requiring Lmod 8.x - I see no reason for keeping support for Lmod 7 if we won't support Lmod 6 anymore (both are old enough to be basically irrelevant now) - although I may be overlooking something.

The problem point is the availability of Lmod 8 on Ubuntu (20.04 and 22.04). Especially for those who do not control the installed packages on the system.

We need make a separate proposal for other module tools. I've explicitly stated: "This proposed change only relates to supported Lmod version. No change is proposed for support of other module tools." and that no longer is true.

[signalbox2]

Lmod can be installed without root privilege as documented here: https://mdc-easybuild.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Installing-Lmod-without-root-permissions.html and that is what we do to maintain EasyBuild and Lmod on a large HPC where we are just normal users. It is CentOS 7 but I am assuming that it also works for Ubuntu, so I am in favour of seeing if users can be pushed to Lmod 8. I'm sure Robert McLay would be grateful. But perhaps an Ubuntu user should comment.

[boegel]

@surak What are your thoughts on this, since you maintain Lmod packages for Ubuntu in https://github.com/surak/Lmod/releases ?

[surak]

Go for it. First because Debian stable already picked it up, and so will the next ubuntu.

I am discussing with Ubuntu to make a backport for the 20 and 22. They are not fond of changing packages on old distributions like this, but I am still trying to make the case for it.

In any case, there are packages for the system which I provide.

[surak]

The current discussion with ubuntu people is that the best option is to create a PPA, as this is not a security update. That would also work with debian if one adds the debian version on the ppa.

[surak]

Debian SID and Bullseye have 8.6.19, so all good!
Ubuntu has 8.6.19 since Ubuntu 22.10 (The problem is that 20.04 and 22.04, the two LTS versions, have 6.6). Those are our only concerns.

[branfosj]

Having discussed this with the community, we have decided that the minimum support Lmod version for EasyBuild 5 will be Lmod 8.0.0. See easybuilders/easybuild-framework#4424