[gin-jobs] Standarized Execution Environment

[Oxana Smirnova]

Hi all,

just read through the thread - in general, I would prefer not to rely on environment variables at all. If they are (unfortunately) necessary, then the Runtime Environment approach introduced ages ago by EDG (and maybe even before) is the proper way of setting them, like Aleksandr says. To define world-wide environment variables is unrealstic, IMHO. $HOME and $PATH are probably the only ones that are relevant, and yet it can be controversial: e.g., if a user comes in a different role, would she have the same $HOME? And most likely $PATH will be different. Hey, even Mozilla dropped MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME :-) And, are there Debian people on this list?..

Quite seriously, with most modern operating systems and softwares I don't need to define any environment variable. Even CVS does not really need CVSROOT to be defined. The unfortunate exceptions that I came across are Globus, Root, and most HEP software. I somehow don't think it means that environment variables are good.

And the last argument for tonight: nothing prevents a user to submit a task that starts by unsetting all variables and aliases. I for my part use to do it, to be sure I work in a controlled environment. How are we going to educate all the users to keep their hands off "our" variables?

Cheers,
Oxana

Laurence Field пишет:
> Hi,
> 
> One of the problems that we found during the interoperation activities 
> was with the different environments found on the worker nodes in the 
> different grids.  Getting the jobs to arrive on the worker node is one 
> problem, ensuring that the jobs run correctly is another and this 
> problem has mainly been overlooked.  During the joint operations 
> workshop in Bologna between OSG and EGEE this problem was brought up and 
> discussed. The result was the following document which suggests 
> standardizing the execution environment.
> 
> http://edms.cern.ch/document/630962
> 
> I have already scheduled a BOF at OGF 20 to discuss this issue further.
> 
> Feedback on this topic is more than welcome.
> 
> 
> Laurence
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