(Peter) desired modeling for compiler assignment - minimizing mismatches:
if you have W -> X -> [Y, Z]
Spack will prefer W%clang -> X%gcc -> [y%gcc, Z%gcc]
to W%clang -> X%clang -> [y%gcc, Z%gcc]
(i.e. in Spack’s model, there is only one mismatch in the first case)
Possible Agenda items
(Davide) Desire to duplicate an installation
Does overwrite of spack.lock/spack.yaml work?
You can also "version" the environment: copy the lock/yaml to a new environment in the production environment (then, if users have no issues with the new environment, remove the old environment)
If the user exposes the packages in the environment with modules, do we need per-environment modules?
(Davide) In my case I version-control the modules so this isn't an issue
(Davide) what about major version updates?
Do users pull major updates to their installations? How big a leap do people do in general? And how often?
(Peter) we may have a poll on this, but otherwise it would be interesting to conduct one