Known Problems with Spack

Known problems with Spack and how to resolve them.

Error: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument ‘capture_output’

Spack uses a Python version < 3.6. To fix this issue start again with a clean shell and execute the following (code below is for Daint):

module load cray-python # on daint
source $SPACK_ROOT/share/spack/setup-env.sh

Error: Initialization hangs

If source $SPACK_ROOT/share/spack/setup-env.sh hangs, clean your cache:

rm -rf ~/.spack/cray ~/.spack/cache

Then try again.

Error: Could not determine host

In case you have anything printing the hostname to the terminal in your .bashrc like

echo $(hostname)

the setup-env.sh script for Spack does not work. A possible workaround is to direct the “echo” to the stderr:

echo $(hostname) >&2

Error: Broken cache

(Happening when mixing spack installations and caches)

If spack install <package>@<version>%<compiler> prints an error message like:

==> Error: 'str' object has no attribute 'get'

you should remove your spack user config scope which is containing the broken cache:

rm -rf ~/.spack

Then try again.

Delete entire Spack

As a last option it sometimes helps to delete all directories used by Spack. These are:

• spack-install

• spack-stages

• modules

• cache

It is important to completely whipe out the folders listed above using the following commands:

Beware you loose all your installed packages installed by Spack

# delete spack-install folder
rm -rf your_path_to/spack-install

# delete spack-stages folder
rm -rf your_path_to/spack-stages

# delete modules folder
rm -rf your_path_to/modules

# delete cache folder
rm -rf ~/.spack/cache

Known Problems with Spack & ICON

Error: FetchError: Archive was empty for icon

Usually happens when trying to do an out-of-source build of ICON, inside of an empty directory. Spack unfortunately does not allow to build in a empty directory, you should therefore create a fake file:

touch fake.file
spack dev-build ...

Error: ProcessError: ./config/cscs/<machine>.<target>.<compiler>: No such file or directory

Usually happens when trying to do an out-of-source build of ICON. Either you are in a branch of icon, which indeed do not contrain <machine>.<target>.<compiler>, or you did give a wrong config_dir argument which should point to icon base directory.

Check your config_dir argument and its given relative path again:

spack dev-build -u build icon@dev-build%nvhpc config_dir=./.. icon_target=gpu