Developer Contributions

Often package installers at HPC sites have a difficult time figuring out what should be in the modulefiles, in terms of information and the environment variable setting they want the package to have. Often there is no consistency in the content and/or format in the modulefiles.

Developers can indirectly and directly contribute to the content of modulefiles.

Indirectly, developers already contribute to a consistency by using directory names consistent with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, FHS (also content in Wikipedia FHS). See /usr directory in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (bin, lib, include, etc.).

Directly, developers can contribute by providing basic package information that can be included in whatis modulefile entries (key-value pairs), as shown in the examples above. Mkmod searches for a file named modules_what (and provides variable substitution-- which should be minimal for package-provided information). At TACC, the Name, Version, Category, URL and Description keywords (and values) are included in all modulefiles so that a software catalogue can be built, from the key:value pairs in all the installed modulefiles. The following example shows the content of a modules_whatis file that would provide sites with developer “blessed” package information (useful to installers and mkmod). The following table lists the whatis information that TACC provides for XALT:

Name:        XALT
Version:     2.4
Category:    tools
Keywords:    System, TOOLS
URL:         http://xalt.sf.net
Description: Collects system usage data

Likewise, developers can provide their own help information in a modules_help file as plain text (with variable substitution). The list of possible help instructions include:

• Examples of package execution
• Compiler and loader options for libraries
• List of runtime environment variables for package and suggested values