TSC_meeting_notes_20260218

Technical Steering Committee meeting 2026-02-18

• Date: Wednesday, February 18 at 5:00 PM CET
• Link: https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/99574628270?password=a922b10d-f715-4de7-bcc3-bfc6ae82435c

Agenda

• Project news
• HPSF Conference 2026
• Recent developments
• Discuss feature set for next version (5.7)
• Collaboration with other projects
• Q&A
• Next meeting

Meeting notes

Attendees: 8 (maintainers: 2/2)

Project news

• Modules is now a Linux Foundation project under the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF)
• We have established an open governance and today's meeting is part of that
• New maintainer: welcome Adrien Cotte (AS+)
  • Modules has now a team of 2 maintainers
• New website URL: https://envmodules.io
• Migrated mailing-list: https://lists.hpsf.io/g/modules-interest
• Not new, but good to advertise again that there is a Chat room on Matrix for Modules: https://matrix.to/#/#modules:matrix.org

HPSF Conference 2026

• We will take part of the HPSFcon in Chicago (16-20 march)
• There will be a session dedicated to Environment Modules on Wednesday afternoon (March 18th)
• Session open to any "module" implementation
  • There will be a talk on Lmod (given by Xavier on on behalf of Lmod team which cannot attend the event)
  • Xavier & Adrien will present Modules roadmap, recent developments and will showcase usually unknown features
• Full conference schedule: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/hpsf-conference/program/schedule/
• Registration link: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/hpsf-conference/register/

Recent developments

• Improve performance when loading large amount of modules
  • https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/MIGRATING.html#improving-evaluation-performances
• Update order of entries in path environment variable
  • https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/MIGRATING.html#reorder-existing-entries-in-path-like-variables
• Add abbreviated option for --no-pager
• Add abbreviated option for --paginate
• Add configuration option to enable pagination
  • https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/module.html#mconfig-paginate
• Add installation option not to compress ChangeLog file
• Give access to getenv in modulerc evaluation context
  • https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/modulefile.html#modules-specific-tcl-commands
• better code to pass all arguments of cmake function to execute_process
• module-info usergroups returns error if gid cannot be mapped
• Add configuration to list module tags that should not be exported
  • https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/module.html#mconfig-non_exportable_tags

Discuss feature set for next version (5.7)

Next version is 5.7. It is expected to be released somewhere in Q3 2026.

The Recent developments presented have already been landed in the main branch for next version.

In addition to that, the following features are proposed for 5.7:

• Add user guide to demonstrate not well known features
• Bind an environment variable on another
• Stable hook API for modulefile/modulerc evaluation
• Report full via path
• Consider module extension only as informational purpose
• Silent purge fails when super-sticky module prerequisite isn't super-sticky
• Initialize path-like env variable to a configured value when first time set
• Improve cache mechanism when modulepath contains a large amount of non-modulefiles
• Improve performance when loading a given module with numerous alternative versions or non-modulefile
• Make Python init more language native

This will be reviewed at next TSC meeting (during Q2) to determine if other additions are possible.

Collaboration with other projects

We contribute to other projects that make use or support module, currently:

• EasyBuild: collaboration last summer to improve their support for Environment Modules
• Spack: upcoming work to be able to build hierarchical modulefiles for Tcl
• EESSI: upcoming work to add support for Environment Modules as a module tool

Q&A

• How to test the performance improvements described
  • Available in main branch (you can install main version with Spack: spack install environment-modules@main)
  • Examples modulefiles to test against large number of modulefiles are available in the repository (testsuite/modulefiles.eb)
• Many thanks for the work done on the project

Next meeting

Wednesday, May 20 at 5:00 PM CEST (Central European Summer Time)