@boegel some minor remarks, but excellent cleanup. now all that's left is to move some functions out of main in new module!

@stdweird: I'll take the opportunity here to move some stuff around. I already moved cleanup_logfile to an inner function in the main function (doesn't make much sense to move that to an external module I feel).

@stdweird: I finished the moving around of functions out of main.py, which now only features the main function, nothing else.
Unit tests are happy, and so is PyLint (mostly). I was very careful when moving stuff around, so I'm fairly confident I didn't break too much...

@boegel it's an improvement for main, that's true, but easyblock is now 2k+ lines!!!! that's absurd. modules over 1k lines are not readable by any standard imho.

@stweird: By moving stuff out of main.py, only about 300 lines were added to easyblock.py.
There currently are only 6 functions in easyblock.py, and one class definition for EasyBlock. The latter already consumes about 1800 lines by itself...

I understand that you feel that modules should be kept of reasonable size, but at an extreme you can put every function/class in a separate module. I don't think that helps a lot in keeping things organized well...

Here are the current largest modules:

$ find easybuild -name '*.py' | xargs wc -l | sort -s | tail -10
     619 easybuild/tools/config.py
     638 easybuild/tools/options.py
     695 easybuild/framework/easyconfig/easyconfig.py
     792 easybuild/tools/modules.py
     797 easybuild/framework/easyconfig/format/version.py
    1090 easybuild/framework/easyconfig/tools.py
    1373 easybuild/tools/filetools.py
    2250 easybuild/framework/easyblock.py
    2471 easybuild/tools/configobj.py
   23614 total

It doesn't look that bad, imho, especially since 80% of easyblock.py is the 'abstract' EasyBlock class.

For now, I'd leave it at this. This took quite a bit of effort (several hours over the last couple of days) to get to this point, avoiding circular dependencies between modules and trying to make sure nothing was being broken in the process...

I suggest to try and cook up some well defined style guidelines on size of functions, total size of modules and maybe also number of functions per module, before we start breaking up easyblock.py in random multiple modules (remember the graph of Python modules in EasyBuild?).

now tracked in #816. i also opened #817 since i saw the buildstats function pass by.
@boegel ready to merge imho

fix a couple of minor issues, but nothing really major, so merging this all in, thanks for the review @stdweird