Hello,

We recently got some complains from redhat/centos users that wanted to install hwloc on their cluster but couldn't because it brought so many X libraries that they don't care about.

Debian solves this by having two hwloc packages: the main hwloc one, and hwloc-nox where cairo is disabled. You just install one of them, packages are marked as conflicting with each others.

I asked Jirka, our fellow RPM hwloc packager. He feels that RPM distros don't work that way. They usually have a core 'foo' package without X, and something such as 'foo-gui' with the X-enabled binary. So you'd have lstopo and lstopo-gui installed at the same time.

I don't have any preference but RPM is much more widely used than deb in HPC, so we must consider the issue, either in hwloc or in RPM packaging. And we need a solution that is consistent across distros (we don't want users to get lost because Debian/Ubuntu lstopo is graphical while RPM lstopo is not and lstopo-gui is).

It's not hard to build two lstopo binaries in the same hwloc (quick patch attached). But we'd need to decide their names (lstopo/lstopo-nox, lstopo/lstopo-nogui, lstopo-gui/lstopo), and find a good way to make the existing packages deal with them.

How do people feel about this? Is it ok to choose between hwloc and hwloc-nox packages on Debian/Ubuntu? Does somebody want to *always* have a lstopo-nox installed? Should the default lstopo be graphical/cario or not?

Brice

_______________________________________________
hwloc-devel mailing list
hwloc-devel@open-mpi.org
http://www.open-mpi.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/hwloc-devel