Support in rebuilding software stacks after bug fixes

[jhein32]

Regarding bug fixes, I am wondering whether we need a date stamp triggered rebuilding of packages after a bug fix, similar to a standard make procedure.

To explain a bit better, I installed fosscuda/2019b with EB 4.0.1 and ran into the issues associated with PR 9178. The issue sits quite deep down in the toolchain. To fix the installation from the PR, I had to force rebuild a number of packages that I judges as “affected”. I am wondering whether we want/can automatise rebuilding modules after bug fixes in some way. Some of the EB builds are quite complex and doing this manually can be labourious and/or error prone.

I agree this needs careful consideration regarding side effects.

[Flamefire]

I fully support this! What one needs is:

• Some kind of reverse dependency lookup, aka "What installed modules depend on this module according to ECs used?"
• --rebuild-including-dependants to rebuild this software an all software based on this

Note that the former is required for the latter. Separating those 2 allows to generate a list of affected modules and C&P the ones to rebuild manually if the second option does more than one wants

[ocaisa]

The reverse dependency thing is actually quite hard to do, and there's also a question about what it means to do it properly (see #2783 and #2784). One issue is the actual usage of EasyBuild differs greatly between sites.