Development workflow

The instructions given in the Computing setup section simply load all the compiled software into the current environment by updating the relevant environment variables, such as PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc., such that files of all the executables and shared libraries can be located.

Regardless of whether you are running the installation from CVMFS or from a Docker/Apptainer container, the compiled files cannot be modified in a persistent manner. Thus to modify any package a new version of the corresponding code has to be built in a separate folder, where the user has the write permissions. After that the corresponding environment variables have to be updated to point to the newly built package.

General code development

In general the whole software stack is built using the Spack package manager, as described in the corresponding mucoll-spack repository. This method allows to rebuild any piece of the software stack from the ground up, but is quite time-consuming, since it requires multiple preperatory steps:

• installation of Spack;
• setup of the code repositories;
• configuration of the development environment;
• rebuilding of the modified package;
• rebuilding of all the packages that depend on it.

Marlin-processor development

The most frequent need for code development is limited to modifying an existing Marlin processor or adding a new one. In this case a faster approach is available, as described in the corresponding section.