Known Issues¶
This is a list of known bugs in Spack. It provides ways of getting around these problems if you encounter them.
Variants are not properly forwarded to dependencies¶
Status: Expected to be fixed by Spack’s new concretizer
Sometimes, a variant of a package can also affect how its dependencies are
built. For example, in order to build MPI support for a package, it may
require that its dependencies are also built with MPI support. In the
package.py
, this looks like:
depends_on('hdf5~mpi', when='~mpi')
depends_on('hdf5+mpi', when='+mpi')
Spack handles this situation properly for immediate dependencies, and
builds hdf5
with the same variant you used for the package that
depends on it. However, for indirect dependencies (dependencies of
dependencies), Spack does not backtrack up the DAG far enough to handle
this. Users commonly run into this situation when trying to build R with
X11 support:
$ spack install r+X
...
==> Error: Invalid spec: 'cairo@1.14.8%gcc@6.2.1+X arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^bzip2@1.0.6%gcc@6.2.1+shared arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^font-util@1.3.1%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^fontconfig@2.12.1%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^freetype@2.7.1%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^gettext@0.19.8.1%gcc@6.2.1+bzip2+curses+git~libunistring+libxml2+tar+xz arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^glib@2.53.1%gcc@6.2.1~libmount arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^inputproto@2.3.2%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^kbproto@1.0.7%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libffi@3.2.1%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libpng@1.6.29%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libpthread-stubs@0.4%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libx11@1.6.5%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libxau@1.0.8%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libxcb@1.12%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libxdmcp@1.1.2%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libxext@1.3.3%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libxml2@2.9.4%gcc@6.2.1~python arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^libxrender@0.9.10%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^ncurses@6.0%gcc@6.2.1~symlinks arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^openssl@1.0.2k%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^pcre@8.40%gcc@6.2.1+utf arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^pixman@0.34.0%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^pkg-config@0.29.2%gcc@6.2.1+internal_glib arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^python@2.7.13%gcc@6.2.1+shared~tk~ucs4 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^readline@7.0%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^renderproto@0.11.1%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^sqlite@3.18.0%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^tar^util-macros@1.19.1%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^xcb-proto@1.12%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^xextproto@7.3.0%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^xproto@7.0.31%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^xtrans@1.3.5%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^xz@5.2.3%gcc@6.2.1 arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64 ^zlib@1.2.11%gcc@6.2.1+pic+shared arch=linux-fedora25-x86_64'.
Package cairo requires variant ~X, but spec asked for +X
A workaround is to explicitly activate the variants of dependencies as well:
$ spack install r+X ^cairo+X ^pango+X
See https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/267 and https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/2546 for further details.
depends_on cannot handle recursive dependencies¶
Status: Not yet a work in progress
Although depends_on
can handle any aspect of Spack’s spec syntax,
it currently cannot handle recursive dependencies. If the ^
sigil
appears in a depends_on
statement, the concretizer will hang.
For example, something like:
depends_on('mfem+cuda ^hypre+cuda', when='+cuda')
should be rewritten as:
depends_on('mfem+cuda', when='+cuda')
depends_on('hypre+cuda', when='+cuda')
See https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/17660 and https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/11160 for more details.