Telcon: 2021 03 09

Tuesday March 9th 8am PST

Agenda

• User maintains a separate repo, removes packages from that repo when they make it into spack
  • Gets errors from Spack when doing command spack load x: package not found
  • Spack in this case is complaining about the fact that the old package definition is missing: Spack thinks it needs the package definition it originally used to install the package
  • The error message could be improved: it doesn't mention the namespace of the package it couldn't find
  • There's a couple short-term fixes
    • If you want to remove a package.py file from the separate repo, you could create a symlink to the original Spack repo (Spack's hashing is changing to account for changes to package.py files though, so this may not be viable long-term, but should be fine for now)
    • Maintain edits to packages in the original git repo as a separate git branch (i.e. change var/spack/repos/builtin/packages)