Intel needed to build Lustre for its non-self-hosted accelerator version of the Phi processor. It turns out that the OS for that is packaged in some weird non-standard way. Intel added support into Lustre to rpm package it. While those additions use words like "cross_build", making it sound like it might be generic, it really isn't.

All of that is really messy and non-standard, and it is making far too difficult to package Lustre for normal rpm-based distributions.

Hopefully this won't be too much of a problem for Intel, because Phi processors are now self-hosting.

If Intel needs to continue to support the accelerator version of Phi, it really needs to do that in a separate spec file from the generic one. Ideally, they would probably do that on their own branch rather than upstream. But I am open to inclusion in the community branch of Lustre if they can figure out a more generic way to do it than the current method. That will almost certainly mean a separate spec file.

I think that separate spec files for different distros are likely the reasonable future for Lustre anyway.