Hi,

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 4:33 PM, hpcleuven <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> One of the things we are not comfortable with is frequent toolchain
> updates. Hence we selected ictce-5.2.0 at the time
>
+1
I agree that having too many toolchains lying around is fragmenting our
attention and our effort;
My belief is that it is good to have the choice, yet as a community we
benefit more with a brief shortlist of well-tested toolchains.

fi. 5.3.0 exposed a certain it-was-to-be-deprecated aspect of the intel
toolchain that became apparent while building QE (#239) and will affect
more; not considering these points when forking toolchains, implies that we
may pay an exponential price on the combinations...

Basically, we feel a six-month cycle for toolchains is a reasonable
> compromise between "freshness" and system administration workload. This was
> agreed upon during one of the previous VSC all-hands meetings. Up to now we
> never synchronized since we (i.e., KU Leuven) don't use Easybuild in
> production yet.
>

Also my stance is that 2-4 times per year is reasonable, and the same rule
should apply
for "combo" work, like biodeps, HPCBIOS policies and the like. I don't
think there is a strict
need to sync across all EasyBuild users, but proposing some kind of plan
would be good (for those who can follow).