Pythia8 environment variables are not set for CentOS7 and Alma9

[tmadlener]

The PYTHIA8 and PYTHIA8DATA environment variables are not set in the current nightly builds, making the CI for k4SimDelphes fail: https://github.com/key4hep/k4SimDelphes/actions/runs/6731118066/job/18295169237?pr=112#step:5:38

In principle these variables are set in the spack recipe here, so I am not sure what is happening in the nightly builds that prevents setting these correctly.

• For CentOS7, I checked

  /cvmfs/sw-nightlies.hsf.org/key4hep/releases/2023-11-02/x86_64-centos7-gcc12.2.0-opt/key4hep-stack/2023-11-02-oemzwb/setup.sh

• For Alma9, I checked

  /cvmfs/sw-nightlies.hsf.org/key4hep/releases/2023-11-02/x86_64-almalinux9-gcc11.3.1-opt/key4hep-stack/2023-11-02-pppkxq/setup.sh

• For Ubuntu 22, I get a much older nightly build and things are still working

  /cvmfs/sw-nightlies.hsf.org/key4hep/releases/2023-10-20/x86_64-ubuntu22.04-gcc11.3.0-opt/key4hep-stack/2023-10-19-eh7r2x/setup.sh

[vvolkl]

The upstream spack recipe only does setup_dependent_run_environment, which seems like a bug. You need those env vars to run pythia8 itself, so it should also do setup_run_environment.

But that it's not currently making it's way into the setup script also seems like a bug, in k4_generate_setup_script. Since we do have dependencies of pythia8 in the stack it should also take into account their run environment.

[tmadlener]

I was also thinking that, but that change has been introduced ~2 years ago and it has been working for quite some time, so I am not sure why it stopped working now or why it works for Ubuntu but not the rest.

[tmadlener]

My suspicion is this commit here: https://github.com/spack/spack/commit/72b36ac14446782f47519db8ee5cff6631b2b4c9

[tmadlener]

My suspicion is this commit here: https://github.com/spack/spack/commit/72b36ac14446782f47519db8ee5cff6631b2b4c9

That might not be it in the end. In my local development environment I created with spack, PYTHIA8 is set correctly. This is also on Ubuntu, so I am not sure whether this is an OS issue?

[jmcarcell]

This isn't happening as of today. That commit lead to some problems related to how setup_dependent_run_environment works but I think they fixed it after I complained.