Spack v0.17.0 is out!

[Todd Gamblin]

Hi all,

I’m really happy to announce that our latest major release is out. This is a *huge* Spack release, with some new features we’ve been working on for the past year.  It has features that people have wanted since we started down this road, including many of the most wanted from our 2020 user survey: https://spack.io/spack-user-survey-2020/.

1. New concretizer is now default
2. New concretizer and GPG are bootstrapped from binaries to get you going fast.
3. Better error messages for the new concretizer
4. Conditional variants (when=“<spec>” for your variants)
5. Git commit versions (spack install hdf5@45bb27f58240a8da7ebb4efc821a1a964d7712a8)
6. You can now override ~/.spack and /etc/spack
7. Reproducibility improvements to Spack Containerize
8. New commands for dealing with tags

Full release notes with much more information are here:

https://github.com/spack/spack/releases/tag/v0.17.0

I want to especially thank all the folks who worked on this: the core Spack team here at LLNL, our 30+ maintainers who work hard to keep the package ecosystem going, and the 513 people who contributed to this release.  We couldn’t do it without this great community.

Get it, try it out, and send us your bug reports!

-Todd

[Todd Gamblin]

One important addendum to these release notes (it’s added on GitHub and we’ll update it in 0.17.1):

0.17.x is the last Spack release series that will support Python 2.6. We will no longer retain 2.6 compatibility in `develop`, and it will be unsupported in 0.18.

We’ve held out for about as long has we can without our dependencies leaving us behind, so we have to finally start phasing out older Pythons.

Todd

On Nov 5, 2021, at 5:45 PM, Todd Gamblin <tgam...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,