Using Spack to build the VFX Reference Platform

[Chad Dombrova]

Hi all!

At the Siggraph BOF I brought up that I have been playing around with a package manager / build tool called Spack.  It was created by the supercomputing community.  

I promised I would finally complete my article on the subject, and here it is: https://dev.to/chadrik/using-spack-to-build-the-vfx-refence-platform-5788

Let me know what you all think.

I have a good friend who works at Lawrence Livermore Lab and he knows Spack quite well (though, funny enough, I found out about Spack through my own research), so if it would be helpful to get him into a Q&A at a VFXRP or ASWF meeting I'm sure he'd be happy to join. 

-chad

[Robert Fanner]

Hi Chad,

Many thanks for the write-up, including the "sharp edges" section. It's lovely having this overview from a VFX-centric perspective.

I'd be very curious to learn more about what it supports by way of introspection and debugging of dependency mismatches. Fully expressing compatibility via a few bits of metadata in binary packages tends to be an achilles heel of sorts in all of the package management systems we've tried. They're either too persnickety about what can be linked together or not persnickety enough. So good support for introspecting when these niggles occur has been important for us on the maintenance side of things with a Conan stack. (Not that it's a panacea!)

Lack of full support for Windows would be a niggle for some, but it's great to see that it offers both Linux and macOS out the box.

Best regards,

Rob

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Rob Fanner

Senior Director of Engineering

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[Chad Dombrova]

Hi Robert,

I don't know Spack well enough to answer your questions, but I can talk to my friend, there is also a Spack slack workspace.  That said, this is a side project for me (my current employer uses Windows), so my goal right now is to cooperate where I can if there is interest from others in furthering this exploration.

-chad

[Robert Fanner]

Thanks Chad - It's great that you've put this resource together, particularly as it's been done as a side project! It's given my engineers a great starting point to have a quick look-see at how it hangs together vs other things we'd looked at previously :)

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