TSC_meeting_notes_20260715

Technical Steering Committee meeting 2026-07-15

• Date: Wednesday, July 15 at 5:00 PM CEST
• Link: https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/99423463805?password=02bab4c0-103d-40c3-9532-a9dcae87b947

Agenda

• Project news
• Recent developments
• Review feature set for next version (5.7)
• Work post next version
• Q&A
• Next meeting

Meeting notes

Attendees: 4 (maintainers: 2/2)

Project news

• Cirrus CI has shut down in June
  • All CI tests are now running on GitHub Actions

Recent developments

• Spack: add the hierarchical configuration option

  • Merged in develop, will be part of next Spack release (1.3)

• Spack: define variants in generated modulefiles based on package variants

  • Goal is to get modules that finely describe the package they give access to
  • Pull requests submitted: #52701, #52702, #52703, #52704, #52705

• Consider - as a separator in module version specification

• depends-on ignores module variant specification

• source Tcl command encoding error on clock command

• Bind an environment variable on another

• Report full via path

• Consider module extension only as informational purpose

• Initialize path-like env variable to a configured value when first time set

• Make Python init more language native

Features or bug fixes created after last TSC meeting:

• Loading a module with a prereq ending with / leads to an error
• couldn't load file "/viper/u1/system/soft/RHEL_9/packages/x86_64/Modules/5.4.0/lib/libtclenvmodules.so"
• complete -p commands do not work with source-sh

Review feature set for next version (5.7)

Next version (5.7) is still expected somewhere in Q3 2026 (september?).

The Recent developments presented today and during last TSC meeting have already been landed in the main branch for next version.

New features or bug fixes proposed for 5.7 (accepted):

• domainname(1) is not available distros using Inetutils like ArchLinux causing various breakages
• A better ways to set modules clearly and safely on Windows platform

Following features already set for 5.7 still need to be developed:

• Add user guide to demonstrate not well known features
• Stable hook API for modulefile/modulerc evaluation
• Silent purge fails when super-sticky module prerequisite isn't super-sticky
• 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
  • Super-speed caching for static module directory trees may be a way to fix this one

Work post next version

• EESSI integration
• OpenHPC integration
• Pmodules features integration

Q&A

No specific question raised.

Next meeting

Wednesday, October 14 at 5:00 PM CEST (Central European Summer Time)