28183, "e-kayrakli", "Fix Mason's spack integration", "2025-12-10T23:36:48Z"
Going into 2.7, test/mason/mason-external tests will fail, and will be made into futures.
The chain of events that led us here is:
- Mason historically hardcoded to use Spack 0.19.0, which is pretty old
- The latest Python version that that Spack can use is 3.11
- After upgrading our test systems to 3.13, we started seeing these tests fail
- Various mason fixes and improvements to prepare for a Parquet package by e-kayrakli · Pull Request #27857 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub started to modernize the Spack integration, but fell short of making these tests pass.
I think there are fundamental changes we should make here:
- Ideally, stop installing spack on our own and make it a dependency we ask the user for. This is covered in Should mason install its own spack if it is not found? · Issue #28179 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub, and can help simplify the implementation.
- We seem to be checking spack's work a bit too much (e.g. are the dependencies installed?). I think we should act like spack is more of a blackbox.
- Try to reduce/remove our reliance on reading Spack's stdout output and try to build our logic based on pattern matching on the output as much as we can.