CHANGELOG.md

v0.18.0 (2022-05-28)

v0.18.0 is a major feature release.

Major features in this release

1. Concretizer now reuses by default

   spack install --reuse was introduced in v0.17.0, and --reuse is now the default concretization mode. Spack will try hard to resolve dependencies using installed packages or binaries (#30396).

   To avoid reuse and to use the latest package configurations, (the old default), you can use spack install --fresh, or add configuration like this to your environment or concretizer.yaml:

   concretizer:
       reuse: false

2. Finer-grained hashes

   Spack hashes now include link, run, and build dependencies, as well as a canonical hash of package recipes. Previously, hashes only included link and run dependencies (though build dependencies were stored by environments). We coarsened the hash to reduce churn in user installations, but the new default concretizer behavior mitigates this concern and gets us reuse and provenance. You will be able to see the build dependencies of new installations with spack find. Old installations will not change and their hashes will not be affected. (#28156, #28504, #30717, #30861)

3. Improved error messages

   Error handling with the new concretizer is now done with optimization criteria rather than with unsatisfiable cores, and Spack reports many more details about conflicting constraints. (#30669)

4. Unify environments when possible

   Environments have thus far supported concretization: together or concretization: separately. These have been replaced by a new preference in concretizer.yaml:

   concretizer:
       unify: [true|false|when_possible]

   concretizer:unify:when_possible will try to resolve a fully unified environment, but if it cannot, it will create multiple configurations of some packages where it has to. For large environments that previously had to be concretized separately, this can result in a huge speedup (40-50x). (#28941)

5. Automatically find externals on Cray machines

   Spack can now automatically discover installed packages in the Cray Programming Environment by running spack external find (or spack external read-cray-manifest to only query the PE). Packages from the PE (e.g., cray-mpich are added to the database with full dependency information, and compilers from the PE are added to compilers.yaml. Available with the June 2022 release of the Cray Programming Environment. (#24894, #30428)

6. New binary format and hardened signing

   Spack now has an updated binary format, with improvements for security. The new format has a detached signature file, and Spack verifies the signature before untarring or decompressing the binary package. The previous format embedded the signature in a tar file, which required the client to run tar before verifying (#30750). Spack can still install from build caches using the old format, but we encourage users to switch to the new format going forward.

   Production GitLab pipelines have been hardened to securely sign binaries. There is now a separate signing stage so that signing keys are never exposed to build system code, and signing keys are ephemeral and only live as long as the signing pipeline stage. (#30753)

7. Bootstrap mirror generation

   The spack bootstrap mirror command can automatically create a mirror for bootstrapping the concretizer and other needed dependencies in an air-gapped environment. (#28556)

8. Nascent Windows support

   Spack now has initial support for Windows. Spack core has been refactored to run in the Windows environment, and a small number of packages can now build for Windows. More details are in the documentation (#27021, #28385, many more)

9. Makefile generation

   spack env depfile can be used to generate a Makefile from an environment, which can be used to build packages the environment in parallel on a single node. e.g.:

   spack -e myenv env depfile > Makefile
   make

   Spack propagates gmake jobserver information to builds so that their jobs can share cores. (#30039, #30254, #30302, #30526)

10. New variant features

    In addition to being conditional themselves, variants can now have conditional values that are only possible for certain configurations of a package. (#29530)

    Variants can be declared "sticky", which prevents them from being enabled or disabled by the concretizer. Sticky variants must be set explicitly by users on the command line or in packages.yaml. (#28630)

• Allow conditional possible values in variants
• Add a "sticky" property to variants

Other new features of note

• Environment views can optionally link only run dependencies with link:run (#29336)
• spack external find --all finds library-only packages in addition to build dependencies (#28005)
• Customizable config:license_dir option (#30135)
• spack external find --path PATH takes a custom search path (#30479)
• spack spec has a new --format argument like spack find (#27908)
• spack concretize --quiet skips printing concretized specs (#30272)
• spack info now has cleaner output and displays test info (#22097)
• Package-level submodule option for git commit versions (#30085, #30037)
• Using /hash syntax to refer to concrete specs in an environment now works even if /hash is not installed. (#30276)

Major internal refactors

• full hash (see above)
• new develop versioning scheme 0.19.0-dev0
• Allow for multiple dependencies/dependents from the same package (#28673)
• Splice differing virtual packages (#27919)

Performance Improvements

• Concretization of large environments with unify: when_possible is much faster than concretizing separately (#28941, see above)
• Single-pass view generation algorithm is 2.6x faster (#29443)

Archspec improvements

• oneapi and dpcpp flag support (#30783)
• better support for M1 and a64fx (#30683)

Removals and Deprecations

• Spack no longer supports Python 2.6 (#27256)

• Removed deprecated --run-tests option of spack install; use spack test (#30461)

• Removed deprecated spack flake8; use spack style (#27290)

• Deprecate spack:concretization config option; use concretizer:unify (#30038)

• Deprecate top-level module configuration; use module sets (#28659)

• spack activate and spack deactivate are deprecated in favor of environments; will be removed in 0.19.0 (#29430; see also link:run in #29336 above)

Notable Bugfixes

• Fix bug that broke locks with many parallel builds (#27846)
• Many bugfixes and consistency improvements for the new concretizer and --reuse (#30357, #30092, #29835, #29933, #28605, #29694, #28848)

Packages

• CMakePackage uses CMAKE_INSTALL_RPATH_USE_LINK_PATH (#29703)
• Refactored lua support: lua-lang virtual supports both lua and luajit via new LuaPackage build system(#28854)
• PythonPackage: now installs packages with pip (#27798)
• Python: improve site_packages_dir handling (#28346)
• Extends: support spec, not just package name (#27754)
• find_libraries: search for both .so and .dylib on macOS (#28924)
• Use stable URLs and ?full_index=1 for all github patches (#29239)

Spack community stats

• 6,416 total packages, 458 new since v0.17.0
  • 219 new Python packages
  • 60 new R packages
• 377 people contributed to this release
  • 337 committers to packages
  • 85 committers to core

v0.17.2 (2022-04-13)

Spack bugfixes

• Fix --reuse with upstreams set in an environment (#29680)
• config add: fix parsing of validator error to infer type from oneOf (#29475)
• Fix spack -C command_line_scope used in conjunction with other flags (#28418)
• Use Spec.constrain to construct spec lists for stacks (#28783)
• Fix bug occurring when searching for inherited patches in packages (#29574)
• Fixed a few bugs when manipulating symlinks (#28318, #29515, #29636)
• Fixed a few minor bugs affecting command prompt, terminal title and argument completion (#28279, #28278, #28939, #29405, #29070, #29402)
• Fixed a few bugs affecting the spack ci command (#29518, #29419)
• Fix handling of Intel compiler environment (#29439)
• Fix a few edge cases when reindexing the DB (#28764)
• Remove "Known issues" from documentation (#29664)
• Other miscellaneous bugfixes (0b72e070583fc5bcd016f5adc8a84c99f2b7805f, #28403, #29261)

v0.17.1 (2021-12-23)

Spack Bugfixes

• Allow locks to work under high contention (#27846)
• Improve errors messages from clingo (#27707 #27970)
• Respect package permissions for sbang (#25764)
• Fix --enable-locks behavior (#24675)
• Fix log-format reporter ignoring install errors (#25961)
• Fix overloaded argparse keys (#27379)
• Allow style commands to run with targets other than "develop" (#27472)
• Log lock messages to debug level, instead of verbose level (#27408)
• Handle invalid unicode while logging (#21447)
• spack audit: fix API calls to variants (#27713)
• Provide meaningful message for empty environment installs (#28031)
• Added opensuse leap containers to spack containerize (#27837)
• Revert "patches: make re-applied patches idempotent" (#27625)
• MANPATH can use system defaults (#21682)
• Add "setdefault" subcommand to spack module tcl (#14686)
• Regenerate views when specs already installed (#28113)

Package bugfixes

• Fix external package detection for OpenMPI (#27255)
• Update the UPC++ package to 2021.9.0 (#26996)
• Added py-vermin v1.3.2 (#28072)

v0.17.0 (2021-11-05)

v0.17.0 is a major feature release.

Major features in this release

1. New concretizer is now default The new concretizer introduced as an experimental feature in v0.16.0 is now the default (#25502). The new concretizer is based on the clingo logic programming system, and it enables us to do much higher quality and faster dependency solving The old concretizer is still available via the concretizer: original setting, but it is deprecated and will be removed in v0.18.0.

2. Binary Bootstrapping To make it easier to use the new concretizer and binary packages, Spack now bootstraps clingo and GnuPG from public binaries. If it is not able to bootstrap them from binaries, it installs them from source code. With these changes, you should still be able to clone Spack and start using it almost immediately. (#21446, #22354, #22489, #22606, #22720, #22720, #23677, #23946, #24003, #25138, #25607, #25964, #26029, #26399, #26599).

3. Reuse existing packages (experimental) The most wanted feature from our 2020 user survey and the most wanted Spack feature of all time (#25310). spack install, spack spec, and spack concretize now have a --reuse option, which causes Spack to minimize the number of rebuilds it does. The --reuse option will try to find existing installations and binary packages locally and in registered mirrors, and will prefer to use them over building new versions. This will allow users to build from source far less than in prior versions of Spack. This feature will continue to be improved, with configuration options and better CLI expected in v0.17.1. It will become the default concretization mode in v0.18.0.

4. Better error messages We have improved the error messages generated by the new concretizer by using unsatisfiable cores. Spack will now print a summary of the types of constraints that were violated to make a spec unsatisfiable (#26719).

5. Conditional variants Variants can now have a when="<spec>" clause, allowing them to be conditional based on the version or other attributes of a package (#24858).

6. Git commit versions In an environment and on the command-line, you can now provide a full, 40-character git commit as a version for any package with a top-level git URL. e.g., spack install hdf5@45bb27f58240a8da7ebb4efc821a1a964d7712a8. Spack will compare the commit to tags in the git repository to understand what versions it is ahead of or behind.

7. Override local config and cache directories You can now set SPACK_DISABLE_LOCAL_CONFIG to disable the ~/.spack and /etc/spack configuration scopes. SPACK_USER_CACHE_PATH allows you to move caches out of ~/.spack, as well (#27022, #26735). This addresses common problems where users could not isolate CI environments from local configuration.

8. Improvements to Spack Containerize For added reproducibility, you can now pin the Spack version used by spack containerize (#21910). The container build will only build with the Spack version pinned at build recipe creation instead of the latest Spack version.

9. New commands for dealing with tags The spack tags command allows you to list tags on packages (#26136), and you can list tests and filter tags with spack test list (#26842).

Other new features of note

• Copy and relocate environment views as stand-alone installations (#24832)
• spack diff command can diff two installed specs (#22283, #25169)
• spack -c <config> can set one-off config parameters on CLI (#22251)
• spack load --list is an alias for spack find --loaded (#27184)
• spack gpg can export private key with --secret (#22557)
• spack style automatically bootstraps dependencies (#24819)
• spack style --fix automatically invokes isort (#24071)
• build dependencies can be installed from build caches with --include-build-deps (#19955)
• spack audit command for checking package constraints (#23053)
• Spack can now fetch from CVS repositories (yep, really) (#23212)
• spack monitor lets you upload analysis about installations to a spack monitor server (#23804, #24321, #23777, #25928))
• spack python --path shows which python Spack is using (#22006)
• spack env activate --temp can create temporary environments (#25388)
• --preferred and --latest options for spack checksum (#25830)
• cc is now pure posix and runs on Alpine (#26259)
• SPACK_PYTHON environment variable sets which python spack uses (#21222)
• SPACK_SKIP_MODULES lets you source setup-env.sh faster if you don't need modules (#24545)

Major internal refactors

• spec.yaml files are now spec.json, yielding a large speed improvement (#22845)
• Splicing allows Spack specs to store mixed build provenance (#20262)
• More extensive hooks API for installations (#21930)
• New internal API for getting the active environment (#25439)

Performance Improvements

• Parallelize separate concretization in environments; Previously 55 min E4S solve now takes 2.5 min (#26264)
• Drastically improve YamlFilesystemView file removal performance via batching (#24355)
• Speed up spec comparison (#21618)
• Speed up environment activation (#25633)

Archspec improvements

• support for new generic x86_64_v2, x86_64_v3, x86_64_v4 targets (see archspec#31)
• spack arch --generic lets you get the best generic architecture for your node (#27061)
• added support for aocc (#20124), arm compiler on graviton2 (#24904) and on a64fx (#24524),

Infrastructure, buildcaches, and services

• Add support for GCS Bucket Mirrors (#26382)
• Add spackbot to help package maintainers with notifications. See spack.github.io/spackbot
• Reproducible pipeline builds with spack ci rebuild (#22887)
• Removed redundant concretizations from GitLab pipeline generation (#26622)
• Spack CI no longer generates jobs for unbuilt specs (#20435)
• Every pull request pipeline has its own buildcache (#25529)
• --no-add installs only specified specs and only if already present in… (#22657)
• Add environment-aware spack buildcache sync command (#25470)
• Binary cache installation speedups and improvements (#19690, #20768)

Deprecations and Removals

• spack setup was deprecated in v0.16.0, and has now been removed. Use spack develop and spack dev-build.
• Remove unused --dependencies flag from spack load (#25731)
• Remove stubs for spack module [refresh|find|rm|loads], all of which were deprecated in 2018.

Notable Bugfixes

• Deactivate previous env before activating new one (#25409)
• Many fixes to error codes from spack install (#21319, #27012, #25314)
• config add: infer type based on JSON schema validation errors (#27035)
• spack config edit now works even if spack.yaml is broken (#24689)

Packages

• Allow non-empty version ranges like 1.1.0:1.1 (#26402)
• Remove .99's from many version ranges (#26422)
• Python: use platform-specific site packages dir (#25998)
• CachedCMakePackage for using *.cmake initial config files (#19316)
• lua-lang allows swapping lua and luajit (#22492)
• Better support for ld.gold and ld.lld (#25626)
• build times are now stored as metadata in $prefix/.spack (#21179)
• post-install tests can be reused in smoke tests (#20298)
• Packages can use pypi attribute to infer homepage/url/list_url (#17587)
• Use gnuconfig package for config.guess file replacement (#26035)
• patches: make re-applied patches idempotent (#26784)

Spack community stats

• 5969 total packages, 920 new since v0.16.0
  • 358 new Python packages, 175 new R packages
• 513 people contributed to this release
  • 490 committers to packages
  • 105 committers to core
• Lots of GPU updates:
  • ~77 CUDA-related commits
  • ~66 AMD-related updates
  • ~27 OneAPI-related commits
  • 30 commits from AMD toolchain support
• spack test usage in packages is increasing
  • 1669 packages with tests (mostly generic python tests)
  • 93 packages with their own tests

v0.16.3 (2021-09-21)

• clang/llvm: fix version detection (#19978)
• Fix use of quotes in Python build system (#22279)
• Cray: fix extracting paths from module files (#23472)
• Use AWS CloudFront for source mirror (#23978)
• Ensure all roots of an installed environment are marked explicit in db (#24277)
• Fix fetching for Python 3.8 and 3.9 (#24686)
• locks: only open lockfiles once instead of for every lock held (#24794)
• Remove the EOL centos:6 docker image

v0.16.2 (2021-05-22)

• Major performance improvement for spack load and other commands. (#23661)
• spack fetch is now environment-aware. (#19166)
• Numerous fixes for the new, clingo-based concretizer. (#23016, #23307, #23090, #22896, #22534, #20644, #20537, #21148)
• Supoprt for automatically bootstrapping clingo from source. (#20652, #20657 #21364, #21446, #21913, #22354, #22444, #22460, #22489, #22610, #22631)
• Python 3.10 support: collections.abc (#20441)
• Fix import issues by using __import__ instead of Spack package importe. (#23288, #23290)
• Bugfixes and --source-dir argument for spack location. (#22755, #22348, #22321)
• Better support for externals in shared prefixes. (#22653)
• spack build-env now prefers specs defined in the active environment. (#21642)
• Remove erroneous warnings about quotes in from_sourcing_files. (#22767)
• Fix clearing cache of InternalConfigScope. (#22609)
• Bugfix for active when pkg is already active error. (#22587)
• Make SingleFileScope able to repopulate the cache after clearing it. (#22559)
• Channelflow: Fix the package. (#22483)
• More descriptive error message for bugs in package.py (#21811)
• Use package-supplied autogen.sh. (#20319)
• Respect -k/verify-ssl-false in _existing_url method. (#21864)

v0.16.1 (2021-02-22)

This minor release includes a new feature and associated fixes:

• intel-oneapi support through new packages (#20411, #20686, #20693, #20717, #20732, #20808, #21377, #21448)

This release also contains bug fixes/enhancements for:

• HIP/ROCm support (#19715, #20095)
• concretization (#19988, #20020, #20082, #20086, #20099, #20102, #20128, #20182, #20193, #20194, #20196, #20203, #20247, #20259, #20307, #20362, #20383, #20423, #20473, #20506, #20507, #20604, #20638, #20649, #20677, #20680, #20790)
• environment install reporting fix (#20004)
• avoid import in ABI compatibility info (#20236)
• restore ability of dev-build to skip patches (#20351)
• spack find -d spec grouping (#20028)
• spack smoke test support (#19987, #20298)
• macOS fixes (#20038, #21662)
• abstract spec comparisons (#20341)
• continuous integration (#17563)
• performance improvements for binary relocation (#19690, #20768)
• additional sanity checks for variants in builtin packages (#20373)
• do not pollute auto-generated configuration files with empty lists or dicts (#20526)

plus assorted documentation (#20021, #20174) and package bug fixes/enhancements (#19617, #19933, #19986, #20006, #20097, #20198, #20794, #20906, #21411).

v0.16.0 (2020-11-18)

v0.16.0 is a major feature release.

Major features in this release

1. New concretizer (experimental) Our new backtracking concretizer is now in Spack as an experimental feature. You will need to install clingo@master+python and set concretizer: clingo in config.yaml to use it. The original concretizer is not exhaustive and is not guaranteed to find a solution if one exists. We encourage you to use the new concretizer and to report any bugs you find with it. We anticipate making the new concretizer the default and including all required dependencies for it in Spack v0.17. For more details, see #19501.

2. spack test (experimental) Users can add test() methods to their packages to run smoke tests on installations with the new spack test command (the old spack test is now spack unit-test). spack test is environment-aware, so you can spack install an environment and spack test run smoke tests on all of its packages. Historical test logs can be perused with spack test results. Generic smoke tests for MPI implementations, C, C++, and Fortran compilers as well as specific smoke tests for 18 packages. This is marked experimental because the test API (self.run_test()) is likely to be change, but we encourage users to upstream tests, and we will maintain and refactor any that are added to mainline packages (#15702).

3. spack develop New spack develop command allows you to develop several packages at once within a Spack environment. Running spack develop foo@v1 and spack develop bar@v2 will check out specific versions of foo and bar into subdirectories, which you can then build incrementally with spack install (#15256).

4. More parallelism Spack previously installed the dependencies of a single spec in parallel. Entire environments can now be installed in parallel, greatly accelerating builds of large environments. get parallelism from individual specs. Spack now parallelizes entire environment builds (#18131).

5. Customizable base images for spack containerize spack containerize previously only output a Dockerfile based on ubuntu. You may now specify any base image of your choosing (#15028).

6. more external finding spack external find was added in v0.15, but only cmake had support. spack external find can now find bison, cuda, findutils, flex, git, lustre m4, mpich, mvapich2, ncurses, openmpi, perl, spectrum-mpi, tar, and texinfo on your system and add them automatically to packages.yaml.

7. Support aocc, nvhpc, and oneapi compilers We are aggressively pursuing support for the newest vendor compilers, especially those for the U.S. exascale and pre-exascale systems. Compiler classes and auto-detection for aocc, nvhpc, oneapi are now in Spack (#19345, #19294, #19330).

Additional new features of note

• New spack mark command can be used to designate packages as explicitly installed, so that spack gc will not garbage-collect them (#16662).
• install_tree can be customized with Spack's projection format (#18341)
• sbang now lives in the install_tree so that all users can access it (#11598)
• csh and tcsh users no longer need to set SPACK_ROOT before sourcing setup-env.csh (#18225)
• Spec syntax now supports variant=* syntax for finding any package that has a particular variant (#19381).
• Spack respects SPACK_GNUPGHOME variable for custom GPG directories (#17139)
• Spack now recognizes Graviton chips

Major refactors

• Use spawn instead of fork on Python >= 3.8 on macOS (#18205)
• Use indexes for public build caches (#19101, #19117, #19132, #19141, #19209)
• sbang is an external package now (https://github.com/spack/sbang, #19582)
• archspec is an external package now (https://github.com/archspec/archspec, #19600)

Deprecations and Removals

• spack bootstrap was deprecated in v0.14.0, and has now been removed.
• spack setup is deprecated as of v0.16.0.
• What was spack test is now called spack unit-test. spack test is now the smoke testing feature in (2) above.

Bugfixes

Some of the most notable bugfixes in this release include:

• Better warning messages for deprecated syntax in packages.yaml (#18013)
• buildcache list --allarch now works properly (#17827)
• Many fixes and tests for buildcaches and binary relcoation (#15687, *#17455, #17418, #17455, #15687, #18110)

Package Improvements

Spack now has 5050 total packages, 720 of which were added since v0.15.

• ROCm packages (hip, aomp, more) added by AMD (#19957, #19832, others)
• Many improvements for ARM support
• llvm-flang, flang, and f18 removed, as llvm has real flang support since Flang was merged to LLVM mainline
• Emerging support for spack external find and spack test in packages.

Infrastructure

• Major infrastructure improvements to pipelines on gitlab.spack.io
• Support for testing PRs from forks (#19248) is being enabled for all forks to enable rolling, up-to-date binary builds on develop

v0.15.4 (2020-08-12)

This release contains one feature addition:

• Users can set SPACK_GNUPGHOME to override Spack's GPG path (#17139)

Several bugfixes for CUDA, binary packaging, and spack -V:

• CUDA package's .libs method searches for libcudart instead of libcuda (#18000)
• Don't set CUDAHOSTCXX in environments that contain CUDA (#17826)
• buildcache create: NoOverwriteException is a warning, not an error (#17832)
• Fix spack buildcache list --allarch (#17884)
• spack -V works with releases/latest tag and shallow clones (#17884)

And fixes for GitHub Actions and tests to ensure that CI passes on the release branch (#15687, #17279, #17328, #17377, #17732).

v0.15.3 (2020-07-28)

This release contains the following bugfixes:

• Fix handling of relative view paths (#17721)
• Fixes for binary relocation (#17418, #17455)
• Fix redundant printing of error messages in build environment (#17709)

It also adds a support script for Spack tutorials:

• Add a tutorial setup script to share/spack (#17705, #17722)

v0.15.2 (2020-07-23)

This minor release includes two new features:

• Spack install verbosity is decreased, and more debug levels are added (#17546)
• The $spack/share/spack/keys directory contains public keys that may be optionally trusted for public binary mirrors (#17684)

This release also includes several important fixes:

• MPICC and related variables are now cleand in the build environment (#17450)
• LLVM flang only builds CUDA offload components when +cuda (#17466)
• CI pipelines no longer upload user environments that can contain secrets to the internet (#17545)
• CI pipelines add bootstrapped compilers to the compiler config (#17536)
• spack buildcache list does not exit on first failure and lists later mirrors (#17565)
• Apple's "gcc" executable that is an apple-clang compiler does not generate a gcc compiler config (#17589)
• Mixed compiler toolchains are merged more naturally across different compiler suffixes (#17590)
• Cray Shasta platforms detect the OS properly (#17467)
• Additional more minor fixes.

v0.15.1 (2020-07-10)

This minor release includes several important fixes:

• Fix shell support on Cray (#17386)
• Fix use of externals installed with other Spack instances (#16954)
• Fix gcc+binutils build (#9024)
• Fixes for usage of intel-mpi (#17378 and #17382)
• Fixes to Autotools config.guess detection (#17333 and #17356)
• Update spack install message to prompt user when an environment is not explicitly activated (#17454)

This release also adds a mirror for all sources that are fetched in Spack (#17077). It is expected to be useful when the official website for a Spack package is unavailable.

v0.15.0 (2020-06-28)

v0.15.0 is a major feature release.

Major Features in this release

1. Cray support Spack will now work properly on Cray "Cluster" systems (non XC systems) and after a module purge command on Cray systems. See #12989

2. Virtual package configuration Virtual packages are allowed in packages.yaml configuration. This allows users to specify a virtual package as non-buildable without needing to specify for each implementation. See #14934

3. New config subcommands This release adds spack config add and spack config remove commands to add to and remove from yaml configuration files from the CLI. See #13920

4. Environment activation Anonymous environments are no longer automatically activated in the current working directory. To activate an environment from a spack.yaml file in the current directory, use the spack env activate . command. This removes a concern that users were too easily polluting their anonymous environments with accidental installations. See #17258

5. Apple clang compiler The clang compiler and the apple-clang compiler are now separate compilers in Spack. This allows Spack to improve support for the apple-clang compiler. See #17110

6. Finding external packages Spack packages can now support an API for finding external installations. This allows the spack external find command to automatically add installations of those packages to the user's configuration. See #15158

Additional new features of note

• support for using Spack with the fish shell (#9279)
• spack load --first option to load first match (instead of prompting user) (#15622)
• support the Cray cce compiler both new and classic versions (#17256, #12989)
• spack dev-build command:
  • supports stopping before a specified phase (#14699)
  • supports automatically launching a shell in the build environment (#14887)
• spack install --fail-fast allows builds to fail at the first error (rather than best-effort) (#15295)
• environments: SpecList references can be dereferenced as compiler or dependency constraints (#15245)
• spack view command: new support for a copy/relocate view type (#16480)
• ci pipelines: see documentation for several improvements
• spack mirror -a command now supports excluding packages (#14154)
• spack buildcache create is now environment-aware (#16580)
• module generation: more flexible format for specifying naming schemes (#16629)
• lmod module generation: packages can be configured as core specs for lmod hierarchy (#16517)

Deprecations and Removals

The following commands were deprecated in v0.13.0, and have now been removed:

• spack configure
• spack build
• spack diy

The following commands were deprecated in v0.14.0, and will be removed in the next major release:

• spack bootstrap

Bugfixes

Some of the most notable bugfixes in this release include:

• Spack environments can now contain the string -h (#15429)
• The spack install gracefully handles being backgrounded (#15723, #14682)
• Spack uses -isystem instead of -I in cases that the underlying build system does as well (#16077)
• Spack no longer prints any specs that cannot be safely copied into a Spack command (#16462)
• Incomplete Spack environments containing python no longer cause problems (#16473)
• Several improvements to binary package relocation

Package Improvements

The Spack project is constantly engaged in routine maintenance, bugfixes, and improvements for the package ecosystem. Of particular note in this release are the following:

• Spack now contains 4339 packages. There are 430 newly supported packages in v0.15.0
• GCC now builds properly on ARM architectures (#17280)
• Python: patched to support compiling mixed C/C++ python modules through distutils (#16856)
• improvements to pytorch and py-tensorflow packages
• improvements to major MPI implementations: mvapich2, mpich, openmpi, and others

Spack Project Management:

• Much of the Spack CI infrastructure has moved from Travis to GitHub Actions (#16610, #14220, #16345)
• All merges to the develop branch run E4S CI pipeline (#16338)
• New spack debug report command makes reporting bugs easier (#15834)

v0.14.2 (2020-04-15)

This is a minor release on the 0.14 series. It includes performance improvements and bug fixes:

• Improvements to how spack install handles foreground/background (#15723)
• Major performance improvements for reading the package DB (#14693, #15777)
• No longer check for the old index.yaml database file (#15298)
• Properly activate environments with '-h' in the name (#15429)
• External packages have correct .prefix in environments/views (#15475)
• Improvements to computing env modifications from sourcing files (#15791)
• Bugfix on Cray machines when getting TERM env variable (#15630)
• Avoid adding spurious LMOD env vars to Intel modules (#15778)
• Don't output [+] for mock installs run during tests (#15609)

v0.14.1 (2020-03-20)

This is a bugfix release on top of v0.14.0. Specific fixes include:

• several bugfixes for parallel installation (#15339, #15341, #15220, #15197)
• spack load now works with packages that have been renamed (#14348)
• bugfix for suite-sparse installation (#15326)
• deduplicate identical suffixes added to module names (#14920)
• fix issues with configure_args during module refresh (#11084)
• increased test coverage and test fixes (#15237, #15354, #15346)
• remove some unused code (#15431)

v0.14.0 (2020-02-23)

v0.14.0 is a major feature release, with 3 highlighted features:

1. Distributed builds. Multiple Spack instances will now coordinate properly with each other through locks. This works on a single node (where you've called spack several times) or across multiple nodes with a shared filesystem. For example, with SLURM, you could build trilinos and its dependencies on 2 24-core nodes, with 3 Spack instances per node and 8 build jobs per instance, with srun -N 2 -n 6 spack install -j 8 trilinos. This requires a filesystem with locking enabled, but not MPI or any other library for parallelism.

2. Build pipelines. You can also build in parallel through Gitlab CI. Simply create a Spack environment and push it to Gitlab to build on Gitlab runners. Pipeline support is now integrated into a single spack ci command, so setting it up is easier than ever. See the Pipelines section in the docs.

3. Container builds. The new spack containerize command allows you to create a Docker or Singularity recipe from any Spack environment. There are options to customize the build if you need them. See the Container Images section in the docs.

In addition, there are several other new commands, many bugfixes and improvements, and spack load no longer requires modules, so you can use it the same way on your laptop or on your supercomputer.

Spack grew by over 300 packages since our last release in November 2019, and the project grew to over 500 contributors. Thanks to all of you for making yet another great release possible. Detailed notes below.

Major new core features

• Distributed builds: spack instances coordinate and build in parallel (#13100)
• New spack ci command to manage CI pipelines (#12854)
• Generate container recipes from environments: spack containerize (#14202)
• spack load now works without using modules (#14062, #14628)
• Garbage collect old/unused installations with spack gc (#13534)
• Configuration files all set environment modifications the same way (#14372, docs)
• spack commands --format=bash auto-generates completion (#14393, #14607)
• Packages can specify alternate fetch URLs in case one fails (#13881)

Improvements

• Improved locking for concurrency with environments (#14676, #14621, #14692)
• spack test sends args to pytest, supports better listing (#14319)
• Better support for aarch64 and cascadelake microarch (#13825, #13780, #13820)
• Archspec is now a separate library (see https://github.com/archspec/archspec)
• Many improvements to the spack buildcache command (#14237, #14346, #14466, #14467, #14639, #14642, #14659, #14696, #14698, #14714, #14732, #14929, #15003, #15086, #15134)

Selected Bugfixes

• Compilers now require an exact match on version (#8735, #14730, #14752)
• Bugfix for patches that specified specific versions (#13989)
• spack find -p now works in environments (#10019, #13972)
• Dependency queries work correctly in spack find (#14757)
• Bugfixes for locking upstream Spack instances chains (#13364)
• Fixes for PowerPC clang optimization flags (#14196)
• Fix for issue with compilers and specific microarchitectures (#13733, #14798)

New commands and options

• spack ci (#12854)
• spack containerize (#14202)
• spack gc (#13534)
• spack load accepts --only package, --only dependencies (#14062, #14628)
• spack commands --format=bash (#14393)
• spack commands --update-completion (#14607)
• spack install --with-cache has new option: --no-check-signature (#11107)
• spack test now has --list, --list-long, and --list-names (#14319)
• spack install --help-cdash moves CDash help out of the main help (#13704)

Deprecations

• spack release-jobs has been rolled into spack ci
• spack bootstrap will be removed in a future version, as it is no longer needed to set up modules (see spack load improvements above)

Documentation

• New section on building container images with Spack (see docs)
• New section on using spack ci command to build pipelines (see docs)
• Document how to add conditional dependencies (#14694)
• Document how to use Spack to replace Homebrew/Conda (#13083, see docs)

Important package changes

• 3,908 total packages (345 added since 0.13.0)
• Added first cut at a TensorFlow package (#13112)
• We now build R without "recommended" packages, manage them w/Spack (#12015)
• Elpa and OpenBLAS now leverage microarchitecture support (#13655, #14380)
• Fix octave compiler wrapper usage (#14726)
• Enforce that packages in builtin aren't missing dependencies (#13949)

v0.13.4 (2020-02-07)

This release contains several bugfixes:

• bugfixes for invoking python in various environments (#14349, #14496, #14569)
• brought tab completion up to date (#14392)
• bugfix for removing extensions from views in order (#12961)
• bugfix for nondeterministic hashing for specs with externals (#14390)

v0.13.3 (2019-12-23)

This release contains more major performance improvements for Spack environments, as well as bugfixes for mirrors and a python issue with RHEL8.

• mirror bugfixes: symlinks, duplicate patches, and exception handling (#13789)
• don't try to fetch BundlePackages (#13908)
• avoid re-fetching patches already added to a mirror (#13908)
• avoid re-fetching already added patches (#13908)
• avoid re-fetching already added patches (#13908)
• allow repeated invocations of spack mirror create on the same dir (#13908)
• bugfix for RHEL8 when python is unavailable (#14252)
• improve concretization performance in environments (#14190)
• improve installation performance in environments (#14263)

v0.13.2 (2019-12-04)

This release contains major performance improvements for Spack environments, as well as some bugfixes and minor changes.

• allow missing modules if they are blacklisted (#13540)
• speed up environment activation (#13557)
• mirror path works for unknown versions (#13626)
• environments: don't try to modify run-env if a spec is not installed (#13589)
• use semicolons instead of newlines in module/python command (#13904)
• verify.py: os.path.exists exception handling (#13656)
• Document use of the maintainers field (#13479)
• bugfix with config caching (#13755)
• hwloc: added 'master' version pointing at the HEAD of the master branch (#13734)
• config option to allow gpg warning suppression (#13744)
• fix for relative symlinks when relocating binary packages (#13727)
• allow binary relocation of strings in relative binaries (#13724)

v0.13.1 (2019-11-05)

This is a bugfix release on top of v0.13.0. Specific fixes include:

• spack find now displays variants and other spec constraints
• bugfix: uninstall should find concrete specs by DAG hash (#13598)
• environments: make shell modifications partially unconditional (#13523)
• binary distribution: relocate text files properly in relative binaries (#13578)
• bugfix: fetch prefers to fetch local mirrors over remote resources (#13545)
• environments: only write when necessary (#13546)
• bugfix: spack.util.url.join() now handles absolute paths correctly (#13488)
• sbang: use utf-8 for encoding when patching (#13490)
• Specs with quoted flags containing spaces are parsed correctly (#13521)
• targets: print a warning message before downgrading (#13513)
• Travis CI: Test Python 3.8 (#13347)
• Documentation: Database.query methods share docstrings (#13515)
• cuda: fix conflict statements for x86-64 targets (#13472)
• cpu: fix clang flags for generic x86_64 (#13491)
• syaml_int type should use int.repr rather than str.repr (#13487)
• elpa: prefer 2016.05.004 until sse/avx/avx2 issues are resolved (#13530)
• trilinos: temporarily constrain netcdf@:4.7.1 (#13526)

v0.13.0 (2019-10-25)

v0.13.0 is our biggest Spack release yet, with many new major features. From facility deployment to improved environments, microarchitecture support, and auto-generated build farms, this release has features for all of our users.

Spack grew by over 700 packages in the past year, and the project now has over 450 contributors. Thanks to all of you for making this release possible.

Major new core features

• Chaining: use dependencies from external "upstream" Spack instances
• Environments now behave more like virtualenv/conda
  • Each env has a view: a directory with all packages symlinked in
  • Activating an environment sets PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, CPATH, CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc. to point to this view.
• Spack detects and builds specifically for your microarchitecture
  • named, understandable targets like skylake, broadwell, power9, zen2
  • Spack knows which compilers can build for which architectures
  • Packages can easily query support for features like avx512 and sse3
  • You can pick a target with, e.g. spack install foo target=icelake
• Spack stacks: combinatorial environments for facility deployment
  • Environments can now build cartesian products of specs (with matrix:)
  • Conditional syntax support to exclude certain builds from the stack
• Projections: ability to build easily navigable symlink trees environments
• Support no-source packages (BundlePackage) to aggregate related packages
• Extensions: users can write custom commands that live outside of Spack repo
• Support ARM and Fujitsu compilers

CI/build farm support

• spack release-jobs can detect package.py changes and generate .gitlab-ci.yml to create binaries for an environment or stack in parallel (initial support -- will change in future release).
• Results of build pipelines can be uploaded to a CDash server.
• Spack can now upload/fetch from package mirrors in Amazon S3

New commands/options

• spack mirror create --all downloads all package sources/resources/patches
• spack dev-build runs phases of the install pipeline on the working directory
• spack deprecate permanently symlinks an old, unwanted package to a new one
• spack verify chcecks that packages' files match what was originally installed
• spack find --json prints JSON that is easy to parse with, e.g. jq
• spack find --format FORMAT allows you to flexibly print package metadata
• spack spec --json prints JSON version of spec.yaml

Selected improvements

• Auto-build requested compilers if they do not exist
• Spack automatically adds RPATHs needed to make executables find compiler runtime libraries (e.g., path to newer libstdc++ in icpc or g++)
• setup-env.sh is now compatible with Bash, Dash, and Zsh
• Spack now caps build jobs at min(16, ncores) by default
• spack compiler find now also throttles number of spawned processes
• Spack now writes stage directories directly to $TMPDIR instead of symlinking stages within $spack/var/spack/cache.
• Improved and more powerful spec format strings
• You can pass a spec.yaml file anywhere in the CLI you can type a spec.
• Many improvements to binary caching
• Gradually supporting new features from Environment Modules v4
• spack edit respects VISUAL environment variable
• Simplified package syntax for specifying build/run environment modifications
• Numerous improvements to support for environments across Spack commands
• Concretization improvements

Documentation

• Multi-lingual documentation (Started a Japanese translation)
• Tutorial now has its own site at spack-tutorial.readthedocs.io
  • This enables us to keep multiple versions of the tutorial around

Deprecations

• Spack no longer supports dotkit (LLNL's homegrown, now deprecated module tool)
• spack build, spack configure, spack diy deprecated in favor of spack dev-build and spack install

Important package changes

• 3,563 total packages (718 added since 0.12.1)
• Spack now defaults to Python 3 (previously preferred 2.7 by default)
• Much improved ARM support thanks to Fugaku (RIKEN) and SNL teams
• Support new special versions: master, trunk, and head (in addition to develop)
• Better finding logic for libraries and headers

v0.12.1 (2018-11-13)

This is a minor bugfix release, with a minor fix in the tutorial and a flake8 fix.

Bugfixes

• Add r back to regex strings in binary distribution
• Fix gcc install version in the tutorial

v0.12.0 (2018-11-13)

Major new features

• Spack environments
• spack.yaml and spack.lock files for tracking dependencies
• Custom configurations via command line
• Better support for linking Python packages into view directories
• Packages have more control over compiler flags via flag handlers
• Better support for module file generation
• Better support for Intel compilers, Intel MPI, etc.
• Many performance improvements, improved startup time

License

• As of this release, all of Spack is permissively licensed under Apache-2.0 or MIT, at the user's option.
• Consents from over 300 contributors were obtained to make this relicense possible.
• Previous versions were distributed under the LGPL license, version 2.1.

New packages

Over 2,900 packages (800 added since last year)

Spack would not be possible without our community. Thanks to all of our contributors for the new features and packages in this release!

v0.11.2 (2018-02-07)

This release contains the following fixes:

• Fixes for gfortran 7 compiler detection (#7017)
• Fixes for exceptions thrown during module generation (#7173)

v0.11.1 (2018-01-19)

This release contains bugfixes for compiler flag handling. There were issues in v0.11.0 that caused some packages to be built without proper optimization.

Fixes:

• Issue #6999: FFTW installed with Spack 0.11.0 gets built without optimisations

Includes:

• PR #6415: Fixes for flag handling behavior
• PR #6960: Fix type issues with setting flag handlers
• 880e319: Upstream fixes to list_url in various R packages

v0.11.0 (2018-01-17)

Spack v0.11.0 contains many improvements since v0.10.0. Below is a summary of the major features, broken down by category.

New packages

• Spack now has 2,178 packages (from 1,114 in v0.10.0)
• Many more Python packages (356) and R packages (471)
• 48 Exascale Proxy Apps (try spack list -t proxy-app)

Core features for users

• Relocatable binary packages (spack buildcache, #4854)
• Spack now fully supports Python 3 (#3395)
• Packages can be tagged and searched by tags (#4786)
• Custom module file templates using Jinja (#3183)
• spack bootstrap command now sets up a basic module environment (#3057)
• Simplified and better organized help output (#3033)
• Improved, less redundant spack install output (#5714, #5950)
• Reworked spack dependents and spack dependencies commands (#4478)

Major new features for packagers

• Multi-valued variants (#2386)
• New conflicts() directive (#3125)
• New dependency type: test dependencies (#5132)
• Packages can require their own patches on dependencies (#5476)
  • depends_on(..., patches=<patch list>)
• Build interface for passing linker information through Specs (#1875)
  • Major packages that use blas/lapack now use this interface
• Flag handlers allow packages more control over compiler flags (#6415)
• Package subclasses support many more build systems:
  • autotools, perl, qmake, scons, cmake, makefile, python, R, WAF
  • package-level support for installing Intel HPC products (#4300)
• spack blame command shows contributors to packages (#5522)
• spack create now guesses many more build systems (#2707)
• Better URL parsing to guess package version URLs (#2972)
• Much improved PythonPackage support (#3367)

Core

• Much faster concretization (#5716, #5783)
• Improved output redirection (redirecting build output works properly #5084)
• Numerous improvements to internal structure and APIs

Tutorials & Documentation

• Many updates to documentation
• New tutorial material from SC17
  • configuration
  • build systems
  • build interface
  • working with module generation
• Documentation on docker workflows and best practices

Selected improvements and bug fixes

• No longer build Python eggs -- installations are plain directories (#3587)
• Improved filtering of system paths from build PATHs and RPATHs (#2083, #3910)
• Git submodules are properly handled on fetch (#3956)
• Can now set default number of parallel build jobs in config.yaml
• Improvements to setup-env.csh (#4044)
• Better default compiler discovery on Mac OS X (#3427)
  • clang will automatically mix with gfortran
• Improved compiler detection on Cray machines (#3075)
• Better support for IBM XL compilers
• Better tab completion
• Resume gracefully after prematurely terminated partial installs (#4331)
• Better mesa support (#5170)

Spack would not be possible without our community. Thanks to all of our contributors for the new features and packages in this release!

v0.10.0 (2017-01-17)

This is Spack v0.10.0. With this release, we will start to push Spack releases more regularly. This is the last Spack release without automated package testing. With the next release, we will begin to run package tests in addition to unit tests.

Spack has grown rapidly from 422 to 1,114 packages, thanks to the hard work of over 100 contributors. Below is a condensed version of all the changes since v0.9.1.

Packages

• Grew from 422 to 1,114 packages
  • Includes major updates like X11, Qt
  • Expanded HPC, R, and Python ecosystems

Core

• Major speed improvements for spack find and concretization
• Completely reworked architecture support
  • Platforms can have front-end and back-end OS/target combinations
  • Much better support for Cray and BG/Q cross-compiled environments
• Downloads are now cached locally
• Support installations in deeply nested directories: patch long shebangs using sbang

Basic usage

• Easier global configuration via config.yaml
  • customize install, stage, and cache locations
• Hierarchical configuration scopes: default, site, user
  • Platform-specific scopes allow better per-platform defaults
• Ability to set cflags, cxxflags, fflags on the command line
• YAML-configurable support for both Lmod and tcl modules in mainline
• spack install supports --dirty option for emergencies

For developers

• Support multiple dependency types: build, link, and run
• Added Package base classes for custom build systems
  • AutotoolsPackage, CMakePackage, PythonPackage, etc.
  • spack create now guesses many more build systems
• Development environment integration with spack setup
• New interface to pass linking information via spec objects
  • Currently used for BLAS/LAPACK/SCALAPACK libraries
  • Polymorphic virtual dependency attributes: spec['blas'].blas_libs

Testing & Documentation

• Unit tests run continuously on Travis CI for Mac and Linux
• Switched from nose to pytest for unit tests.
  • Unit tests take 1 minute now instead of 8
• Massively expanded documentation
• Docs are now hosted on spack.readthedocs.io