# 3.1. General notes

The following list of release notes applies to this code base as of this writing:

- PMIx includes support for a wide variety of supplemental hardware and software packages. When configuring PMIx, you may need to supply additional flags to the `configure` script in order to tell PMIx where the header files, libraries, and any other required files are located. As such, running `configure` by itself may not include support for all the devices (etc.) that you expect, especially if their support headers / libraries are installed in non-standard locations. See the listing of configure command-line switches, below, for more details.

- The majority of PMIx’s documentation is now on the ReadTheDocs site. The man pages are also installed by default.

- Note that PMIx documentation uses the word “component” frequently; the word “plugin” is probably more familiar to most users. As such, end users can probably completely substitute the word “plugin” wherever you see “component” in our documentation. For what it’s worth, we use the word “component” for historical reasons, mainly because it is part of our acronyms and internal API function calls.

- PMIx has taken some steps towards Reproducible Builds. Specifically, PMIx’s `configure` and `make` process, by default, records the build date and some system-specific information such as the hostname where PMIx was built and the username who built it. If you desire a Reproducible Build, set the `$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH`, `$USER` and `$HOSTNAME` environment variables before invoking `configure` and `make`, and PMIx will use those values instead of invoking `whoami` and/or `hostname`, respectively. See https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/source-date-epoch/ for information on the expected format and content of the `$SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH` variable.