Spack Bootstrap Mirrors

This repository contains several Github Action workflows that are used to generate binaries to bootstrap Spack. Stable binary artifacts are tagged and released.

Purpose of this repository

Spack has some minimum requirements to work correctly. Most of them are currently system requirements i.e. they are assumed to be present on the machines where Spack is run. This is usually the case for common software found on linux systems, such as the patch or tar executables. A few less common, but critical, dependencies are instead bootstrapped by Spack if not present on the system. These are currently:

1. clingo: needed to concretize specs
2. GnuPG: needed to sign and verify binaries
3. patchelf: needed to relocate binaries on linux

The purpose of this repository is to define workflows that generate binary packages suitable for bootstrapping Spack on most architectures. For completeness we report a summary of Spack requirements below:

Name	Supported Versions	System Requirement	Requirement Reason
Python	3.6-3.13	Yes	Interpreter for Spack
C/C++ compilers	-	Yes	Building software
GNU make	-	Yes	Building software
patch	-	Yes	Building software
curl	-	Yes	Fetching archives
tar	-	Yes	Extract/create archives
gzip	-	Yes	Archive compression
unzip	-	Yes	Archive compression
bzip2	-	Yes	Archive compression
xz	-	Yes	Archive compression
zstd	-	Yes	Archive compression
file	-	Yes	Binary packages
patchelf	0.13 or later	No	Binary packages
GnuPG	2.3 or later	No	Binary packages
clingo	5.5	No	Concretization
git	-	Yes	Software repositories
hg	-	Yes	Software repositories
svn	-	Yes	Software repositories

Supported platforms

A few different toolchains have been used to produce binaries depending on the target platform and architecture. Choices have been mainly driven by compatibility with the manylinux project.

Platform	Compatibility	Compiler Toolchain	Architecture	Python
linux	glibc 2.17 or later	GCC 10.2.1	x86_64	3.6-3.13
linux	glibc 2.17 or later	GCC 10.2.1	aarch64	3.6-3.13
linux	glibc 2.17 or later	GCC 10.2.1	ppc64le	3.6-3.13
darwin	macOS 10.13 or later	Apple Clang 15.0.0	x86_64	3.6-3.13
darwin	macOS 11 or later	Apple Clang 15.0.0	aarch64	3.8-3.13

Github Actions Workflows

All the linux workflows make use of a slightly customized manylinux2014 image. The customization is minimal and amounts to building multi-arch images with the same name on Github Actions.

clingo specific caveats

To avoid having runtime dependencies on libstdc++.so, clingo is linked against a static version of the runtime library.

GnuPG specific caveats

On darwin GnuPG had to be built with --disable-nls --without-libintl-prefix to avoid having binary requirements on the system libintl installed in the CI environment.