WHY_DO_THIS.txt

Why create/use this?  

A perfectly valid question, in light of several (many) package managers
such as homebrew on mac/linux, spack on linux, etc.  

First reason has to do with long experience dealing with linux distributions,
and their long disdain for either up-to-date, or even non end-of-life 
base packages.  Red Hat in particular (as well as any distro based upon it)
has notoriously shipped completely EOL Perl, Python, and other tools as their
system default installs.  While this may be fine for their tooling, as 
a computational scientist or engineer, a researcher, anyone in a 
rapidly evolving tooling ecosystem, this means you are forever caught between
the system version of tooling (which IT will almost never want to update
for you to use later versions), and the version you need.

To a degree, this is what tools such as modules (lmodule/gmodule) are 
designed to address as well.  And in some cases they do a great job of it.
In other cases, that I've experienced directly at various work locations in 
the past, this leads to a combinatorial explosion of configurations.  Which
makes reproducibility, debugging, recompilation of patched versions
pretty much a generator of waste heat in the universe, and not something
that would actually benefit the user.  Plus the rather large baggage one
must carry around for modules.  They'll work great on supercomputers.  Not
so well on personal workstations.

Docker containers are another option.  These are great for some specific things,
though I've encountered many end user sites that refuse to use containers
for security reasons ... not because containers are insecure by design 
(this is arguable on linux), but because one cannot always vouch for the 
elements going into the containers.  All you need is one compromised library
(libxz anyone?) to take an entire unrelated stack down.

Finally, one of my major critiques of many of the packages available are
that they are built by non-practioners with options suitable for sysadmins
to build packages, but not for users.  Look at debian's python3 debacle.  
Just try to install a needed package with `pip3 install torch` or similar.
You find out that the package maintainers care more about the package
builder/philosophy behind the builds, than the users going `WTaF is going
on here?`.  This is a common feature of builds/packages/philosophy with 
a defined "right way to do things", which doesn't mesh with your needs.

So this project exists to give you a local install in a local path
(curiously hosted in $HOME/local) of packages you may wish to use.  The
only real philosophy of this is that you control what you build, 
the way you build it.  You don't need someone's permission to use these
(all open source) tools.  You just need to build them.  If you wish
to put them into a container, so be it.  Or modules.  Or Spack.  

It really doesn't matter in the end.  If you don't find this useful, 
by all means use something else.  I find this useful.  I use it everywhere
from small VMs, laptops, deskside/workstations, through supercomputers.

Its quite nice to have the packages work the same everywhere, so that
your code/environment is portable between systems.

Joe Landman 1-Sept-2024