Long term plans

I think it makes sense to replace this current body of shell scripts with:

• spack extensions so that they become spack commands
• config files for:
  • our preferred packages.yaml and
  • mirrors/buildcaches
• and finally, roll all these into the fermi spack branches, pref. as submodules

Thus a git clone --recursive of our fermi spack repository would implicitly include all of our extensions and config files from the repositories.

More specifically git submodules under:

• etc/spack/linux with packages.yaml, bootstrap.yaml, config.yaml updates per os
• var/spack/repos (one each) for all of our current recipe repositories
• var/spack/extensions (one each) with our spack extensions (listed in config.yaml, above)

Then a git clone --recursive of our fermi spack with those submodules will be pretty much configured out of the box.

Extensions wanted:

• linuxexternals -- already rough-drafted, is make_packages_yaml as a spack exension
• subspack -- make sub-spack as a spack extension (draft started)
• build_env -- build_spack_env.sh as a spack extension
• env_buildcache -- make buildcache from packages a) in an environment and b) optionally (--local? ) local to this spack (not upstream)
• Some tool for distributing environments via buildcache:
  • sync_buildcache -- some combination of the buildcache scripts in bin currently(?)
  • spack extension pair for publishing /installing an environment to/from a build cache -- it would buildcache create the packages locally, upload them, and also upload the spack.lock/spack.yaml to some uploaded_envionment directory on the publish, and fetch the spack.{lock,yaml} and create the environment on the install (and optionally install any missing build dependencies?) It could maybe also deal with a tarball on Jenkins or similar?