determine which easyconfigs have been updated (since installation)

[jfgrimm]

As discussed in the recent maintainer summit, it would be very useful to introduce a feature that can make it easier to figure out which easyconfigs have changed, without needing to trawl through release notes. In particular:

• easyconfigs that have changed between the most recent EB releases (maybe look for bugfix and change labels?)
  • potentially filtered against installed easyconfigs in a particular prefix?
  • @Flamefire suggests looking into GitHub GraphQL
  • also consider easyblocks
• comparing an installed easyconfig against the first match in the robot path
  • diff <installdir>/easybuild/<easyconfig> against robot path match
  • could check what ec parameters changed (e.g. new patch, modified configopts, etc)
  • similarly for easyblocks/hooks
  • could do this recursively (for the easyconfig, or whole software tree)

In any case, I think it's useful to have both a reporting mode (human-readable), and a mode that spits out a list of easyconfigs (maybe integrated with --rebuild if you feel adventurous).

[migueldiascosta]

For the Github integration approach and regarding the impact of rate limiting that was raised in slack, this is what Gemini (I know...) has to say, https://gemini.google.com/share/427ee59474e4

Regarding the "local" approach, I guess one could also directly compare, for installed easyconfigs, between the latest release and the release (in installed EasyBuild modules) or tag (in a git working directory) with which that easyconfig was installed (to differentiate actual changes in the release from other changes in the easybuild and reprod folders)

[migueldiascosta]

Tested using the Github search API, works fine, i.e. a single query with repo:easybuilders/easybuild-easyconfigs type:pr is:merged milestone:"5.2.1" label:"bug fix","change" (this syntax on the labels corresponds to a logical OR) returns 74 PRs, for easyblocks 14

For rebuilding we'd probably want to narrow that down though...

EDIT: many of the change PRs are not relevant, probably best to stick to bug fix only, then it's 45 easyconfigs and 13 easyblocks