[slurm-users] Exclude Slurm packages from the EPEL yum repository

Mon Jan 25 07:47:39 UTC 2021

On 1/23/21 9:43 PM, Philip Kovacs wrote:
> I can assure you it was easier for you to filter slurm from your repos 
> than it was for me to make them available to both epel7 and epel8.
> 
> No good deed goes unpunished I guess.

I do sympathize with your desire to make the Slurm installation a bit 
easier by providing RPMs via the EPEL repo.  I do not underestimate the 
amount of work it takes to add software to EPEL.

However, I have several issues with your approach:

1. Breaking existing Slurm installations could cause big time problems at 
a lot of sites!  The combined work to repair broken installations at many 
sites might be substantial.  Sites who are more than two releases behind 
20.11 could end up with dysfunctional clusters.  You are undoubtedly aware 
that 20.11.3 fixes a major problem in 20.11.2 wrt. OpenMPI, so the upgrade 
from 20.02 to 20.11.2 may cause problems.

2. Your EPEL RPMs *must not* upgrade between major Slurm releases, like 
the 20.02 to 20.11 upgrade that almost happened at our site!  I refer 
again to the delicate upgrade procedure described in 
https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/niflheim/Slurm_installation#upgrading-slurm

3. You could have solicited advice from the slurm-users list before 
planning your EPEL Slurm packages.

4. How do you plan to keep updating future Slurm minor versions on EPEL in 
a timely fashion?

5. How did you build your RPM packages?  The built-in options may be 
important, for example, this might be recommended:
$ rpmbuild -ta slurm-xxx.tar.bz2 --with mysql --with slurmrestd

6. Building Slurm RPM packages is actually a tiny part of what it takes to 
install Slurm from scratch.  There are quite a number of prerequisites and 
other things to set up besides the RPMs, see
https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/niflheim/Slurm_installation
plus configuration of Slurm itself and its database.

In conclusion, I would urge you to ensure that your EPEL packages won't 
mess up existing Slurm installations!  I agree with Ryan Novosielski that 
you should rename your RPMs so that they don't overwrite packages built by 
SchedMD's rpmbuild system.

I propose that you add the major version 20.11 right after the "slurm" 
name so that your EPEL RPMs would be named "slurm-20.11-*" like in:

slurm-20.11-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64

People with more knowledge of RPM than I have could help you ensure that 
no unwarranted upgrades or double Slurm installations can take place.

Thanks,
Ole

> On Saturday, January 23, 2021, 07:03:08 AM EST, Ole Holm Nielsen 
> <ole.h.nielsen at fysik.dtu.dk> wrote:
> 
> 
> We use the EPEL yum repository on our CentOS 7 nodes.  Today EPEL
> surprisingly delivers Slurm 20.11.2 RPMs, and the daily yum updates
> (luckily) fail with some errors:
> 
> --> Running transaction check
> ---> Package slurm.x86_64 0:20.02.6-1.el7 will be updated
> --> Processing Dependency: slurm(x86-64) = 20.02.6-1.el7 for package:
> slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> --> Processing Dependency: libslurmfull.so()(64bit) for package:
> slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> ---> Package slurm.x86_64 0:20.11.2-2.el7 will be an update
> --> Processing Dependency: pmix for package: slurm-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64
> --> Processing Dependency: libfreeipmi.so.17()(64bit) for package:
> slurm-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64
> --> Processing Dependency: libipmimonitoring.so.6()(64bit) for package:
> slurm-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64
> --> Processing Dependency: libslurmfull-20.11.2.so()(64bit) for package:
> slurm-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64
> ---> Package slurm-contribs.x86_64 0:20.02.6-1.el7 will be updated
> ---> Package slurm-contribs.x86_64 0:20.11.2-2.el7 will be an update
> ---> Package slurm-devel.x86_64 0:20.02.6-1.el7 will be updated
> ---> Package slurm-devel.x86_64 0:20.11.2-2.el7 will be an update
> ---> Package slurm-perlapi.x86_64 0:20.02.6-1.el7 will be updated
> ---> Package slurm-perlapi.x86_64 0:20.11.2-2.el7 will be an update
> ---> Package slurm-slurmdbd.x86_64 0:20.02.6-1.el7 will be updated
> ---> Package slurm-slurmdbd.x86_64 0:20.11.2-2.el7 will be an update
> --> Running transaction check
> ---> Package freeipmi.x86_64 0:1.5.7-3.el7 will be installed
> ---> Package pmix.x86_64 0:1.1.3-1.el7 will be installed
> ---> Package slurm.x86_64 0:20.02.6-1.el7 will be updated
> --> Processing Dependency: slurm(x86-64) = 20.02.6-1.el7 for package:
> slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> --> Processing Dependency: libslurmfull.so()(64bit) for package:
> slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> ---> Package slurm-libs.x86_64 0:20.11.2-2.el7 will be installed
> --> Finished Dependency Resolution
> Error: Package: slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> (@/slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64)
>              Requires: libslurmfull.so()(64bit)
>              Removing: slurm-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> (@/slurm-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64)
>                  libslurmfull.so()(64bit)
>              Updated By: slurm-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64 (epel)
>                  Not found
> Error: Package: slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> (@/slurm-libpmi-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64)
>              Requires: slurm(x86-64) = 20.02.6-1.el7
>              Removing: slurm-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64
> (@/slurm-20.02.6-1.el7.x86_64)
>                  slurm(x86-64) = 20.02.6-1.el7
>              Updated By: slurm-20.11.2-2.el7.x86_64 (epel)
>                  slurm(x86-64) = 20.11.2-2.el7
>    You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
>    You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
> 
> 
> We still run Slurm 20.02 and don't want EPEL to introduce any Slurm
> updates!!  Slurm must be upgraded with some care, see for example
> https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/niflheim/Slurm_installation#upgrading-slurm 
> <https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/niflheim/Slurm_installation#upgrading-slurm>
> 
> Therefore we must disable EPEL's slurm RPMs permanently.  The fix is to
> add to the file /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo an "exclude=slurm*" line like
> the last line in:
> 
> [epel]
> name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - $basearch
> #baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/$basearch 
> <http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/$basearch>
> metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-7&arch=$basearch&infra=$infra&content=$contentdir 
> <https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-7&arch=$basearch&infra=$infra&content=$contentdir>
> failovermethod=priority
> enabled=1
> gpgcheck=1
> gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-7
> exclude=slurm*
> 
> /Ole
> 