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Issue Disambiguation

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Peter Scheibel edited this page Sep 28, 2020 · 36 revisions

Note: this is primarily intended for consumption by Spack developers.

This page was created with the intention of tracking common issues. There are a number of issues in Spack that are commonly the culprit when a user reports "I tried to build package X and encountered an error Y". We can keep track of the core issue for each problem here and use it to close issues that are redundant (or keep track of when they ought to be fixed).

(1) packageX requires packageY variant +foo, but spec asked for ~foo:

(2) spack spec X ^Y reports ==> Error: X does not depend on Y even though spack spec X includes Y as a dependency:

(3) spack spec is not using settings in packages.yaml:

(4) Spack rebuilds dependencies too much

(5) Error: Multiple providers found for 'foo'

Note that the following issues appear similar but actually occur because Spack does not allow multiple packages which provide the same virtual:

These are actually in the same class of problems as (1). Now that https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/8162 has been merged, specifying a provider explicitly on the command line will generally circumvent this problem.

(6) gcc+binutils and gcc~binutils

Most systems fail when you try spack install gcc+binutils. A few systems need it though. The exact reason why merits some investigation. See:

(7) My package requires python > 3, and a dependency needs python < 3 to build

Currently Spack requires exactly one version of each package (even if the other version would only be needed for build). There have been a few attempts at adding this behavior to Spack, most recently https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/4595. It is a priority but the exact timeline when this will be addressed is unknown.

See also:

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