[jpecar]

Why not just call it swamp? It would better describe the python ecosystem mess ;)

Jokes aside, this feels very meta: package manager for a package manager for a package manager. Reminds me of the old RFC1925: "you can always add another layer of abstraction". That RFC also says "perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

And as a hpc admin, I'm not offering my users any help with conda and let them suffer on their own. Instead I'm showing them the greener pastures with spack, easybuild and eessi whenever I can. And they're slowly migrating over.

[vindex10]

it was also my first thought on abstractions of abstractions, thanks for sharing :)

could you elaborate a bit more on why HPC world is special when it comes to configuring the environment?

I always feel it is a typical problem in software development, to separate operating system env from the application env.

do you use spack / easybuild on your personal computer, for example if you need to install a package that is not part of the distribution?

[tgamblin]

I do for macOS and Linux :). Windows support is also coming along.

There isn’t anything particularly special about the HPC world other than the need for many different configurations of the same software for many different CPU and GPU architectures. You might want to have several versions of the same application installed at once, with different options or optimizations enabled. Spack enables that. Environments are one way to keep the different software stacks separate (though, like nix, spack uses a store model to keep installs in separate directories, as well).

[arthursw]

When I started the project, Spack was not available on Windows so it was not an option. Now I should reconsider this. Thanks!