TSC_meeting_notes_20260520

Technical Steering Committee meeting 2026-05-20

• Date: Wednesday, May 20 at 5:00 PM CEST
• Link: https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/96582126189?password=cf5f9ffa-24e1-41a6-8f12-e0ef4e69969c

Agenda

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

Meeting notes

Attendees: 2 (maintainers: 2/2)

Project news

• HPSF conference 2026 was great

  • Environment Modules session on March 18 afternoon
    • 15-20 attendees
    • They have learnt about a lot of features they were not aware of (ml, output configuration, dependency management, etc)
    • Many many good feedback from the audience
  • Spack session: presentation of module support improvements

• Cirrus CI is shutting down on June 1st

  • We were using this free service especially to test against OSX, FreeBSD, EL and OpenSuse instances
  • Need to migrate these CI test cases to GitHub Actions

• OpenHPC project is open to including Environment Modules as an alternative to Lmod

  • We are happy of this positive return
  • Work to be done after 5.7

Recent developments

• module avail O(N²) performance regression in displayElementList column optimizer with large module counts

• Spack: add the hierarchical configuration option

  • Be able to generate and use a hierarchical module organization with Environment Modules
  • We expect this to be part of next Spack release (1.2)

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

  • Goal is to get modules that finely describe the package they give access to
  • Initial development finished and available at https://github.com/xdelaruelle/spack/tree/variant_defaults
  • Pull request to be submitted after the 1.2 release (we would like this work to be part of 1.3)

Review feature set for next version (5.7)

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

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:

• Consider - as a separator in module version specification
• depends-on ignores module variant specification
• source Tcl command encoding error on clock command

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

• Add user guide to demonstrate not well known features
• Bind an environment variable on another
• Stable hook API for modulefile/modulerc evaluation
• Report full via path
• Consider module extension only as informational purpose
• Silent purge fails when super-sticky module prerequisite isn't super-sticky
• Initialize path-like env variable to a configured value when first time set
• 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
• Make Python init more language native

Work post next version

• EESSI integration
• OpenHPC integration
• Pmodules features integration
  • Achim Gsell works of Pmodules and propose to integrate its features into Modules
  • Several design notes have been elaborated: https://github.com/Pmodules/Pmodules/wiki
  • Need feedback from us to help Achim progress on these developments

Q&A

• Is there a review process for HPSF projects?
  • Yes, each HPSF project should be reviewed every 2 years to assess if their lifecycle level has changed

Next meeting

Wednesday, July 15 at 5:00 PM CEST (Central European Summer Time)