Hi,

The VDT team recently got a bug report about the PBS jobmanager. I've heard of
the problem before, but not a bug fix for it. I'm not qualified to evaluate it
or suggest better code. Given that you maintain it, I hope you can take on this
bug. 

The problem is that submitting a job with a very large environment will fail. I
suspect the fix isn't quite right, though it works for this user's workloads. 

Here's the full text of his bug report:

> From: "Fengping Hu via RT" <vdt-support@opensciencegrid.org>
> Date: August 18, 2009 10:52:22 AM CDT
> Subject: [vdt-support #5688] A bug in pbs.pm?
> Reply-To: vdt-support@opensciencegrid.org
>
> Tue Aug 18 10:52:21 2009: Request 5688 was acted upon.
> Transaction: Ticket created by fhu@purdue.edu
>      Queue: vdt-support
>    Subject: A bug in pbs.pm?
>      Owner: Nobody
> Requestors: fhu@purdue.edu
>     Status: new
> Ticket URL: http://crt.cs.wisc.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=5688
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Hi,
>
> Depend on what path the vdt location is, the pbs.pm could generate a pbs
> job script
> that is unsubmittable due to too long environment variable string to
> export.
>
> We've added three lines to the pbs.pm as a makeshift solution for this
> problem. But I think
> this probably should be addressed by officials.
>
> +    $env_count = @new_env;                                                                                      
> +    @new_env_part1 = splice(@new_env, 0, int($env_count/2) );                                                   
> +    print JOB '#PBS -v ' . join(',', @new_env_part1) . "\n";                                                    
>     print JOB '#PBS -v ' . join(',', @new_env) . "\n";                                                           
>
>
> Thanks,

You can see the full ticket at:

http://crt.cs.wisc.edu/Ticket/Display.html?user=guest&pass=guest&id=5688

What do you think?

Thanks,
-alain
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Alain Roy
Open Science Grid Software Coordinator            roy@cs.wisc.edu
http://opensciencegrid.org                 http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu