khiops_env --env Raises Spurious Error When Environment Modules Are Installed on Non-RPM Linux Operating Systems

[popescu-v]

Description

Currently, khiops_env detects if environment module support is installed on the host Linux operating system. If so, then khiops_env attempts to unload the MPI environment module, and to load the appropriate MPI environment module.

On RPM-based Linux distributions (Rocky 8, 9), this works as expected. On vanilla Debian / Debian-based distributions, this also works as expected, because environment module support is not installed by default.

However, if, for some reason, environment module support is installed on the host Debian-like distribution (via apt-get install environment-modules), then khiops_env detects this support and assumes that the MPI environment module can be loaded, which is not true, because MPI is not packaged with environment module support on these Linux distributions.

This results in a spurious error which is propagated to stderr: ERROR: Unable to locate a modulefile for 'mpi/openmpi-x86_64'. This error has no effect on the functioning of the script, which exits with the 0 return code.

Questions/Ideas

• A solution is to redirect MPI environment module loading attempt's outputs (stdout and stderr) to /dev/null:

  module load mpi/openmpi-x86_64 &> /dev/null

Context

• Khiops version: 10.2.4
• OS description (use khiops -s): Linux Debian and Ubuntu.

[popescu-v]

On the Khiops Python library side, this error can be safely ignored (see also issue KhiopsML/khiops-python#300).

[bruno-at-orange]

Another solution is to use environment modules only on fedora-like distros. There is the variable IS_FEDORA_LIKE in cmake:

khiops/CMakeLists.txt

Line 68 in f7c42b5

set(IS_FEDORA_LIKE false)

We could set USE_ENVIRONMENT_MODULE to empty if IS_FEDORA_LIKE is true in install.cmake.

khiops/packaging/install.cmake

Line 88 in f7c42b5

file(READ ${TMP_DIR}/use_environment_module.sh USE_ENVIRONMENT_MODULE)

And then, the method configure_file will replace @USE_ENVIRONMENT_MODULE@ by the empty string in khiops_env

[bruno-at-orange]

this could be done at the same time as #396