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Goddard-Fortran-Ecosystem / pFlogger

A parallel Fortran logger (based on the design of the Python logger)
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Should pflogger have an option for enabling/disabling MPI #106

Closed climbfuji closed 7 months ago

climbfuji commented 7 months ago

This question is related to issue https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/42137.

I think it is problematic if MPI is enabled silently if it's found somewhere in the search path. That MPI might not be compatible with the compiler/environment that the user is trying to build pflogger for. Wouldn't it be better to make this an option that is off by default and needs to be enabled explicitly, and then fail if enabled but no MPI can be found?

tclune commented 7 months ago

Better in that sense? Unarguably. I blame it on ignorance of my youth -- was only in my 40's when I started that package. I have a number of logical build switches that are similar throughout GFE. (This one is particularly interesting, because I had just learned about "mocking" and actually made it so the MPI logic can be tested without linking to MPI. That creates its own pain points it turns out.)

However, backward compatibility is also a cause unto itself. This has generally led me to leaving things as is. There are probably less than a handful of users of pflogger at this point, so I could probably be convinced to toggle this one. But similar switches in pFUnit would probably create some chaos in various dark corners around the planet.

mathomp4 commented 7 months ago

Yeah, I suppose having something like an ENABLE_MPI switch that defaults to ON would be safe. Then past behavior is preserved.

climbfuji commented 7 months ago

That would work for us, thanks!

tclune commented 7 months ago

@mathomp4 Could you make the attempt, and I'll review?

mathomp4 commented 7 months ago

@mathomp4 Could you make the attempt, and I'll review?

Okay. I'll give it a shot.

mathomp4 commented 7 months ago

I've a PR in #107 which I think does this.

(Note that the CI might not quite work (old GCC?) so I've updated #94 to be like the CI in pFUnit develop. Hopefully this will work, but it might not as that has ifx...)