Summary

Enable Spack to be available to users of PyPI, dpkg, rpm, etc. This will increase the reach of Spack, reduce friction, and ease use by other projects that integrate Spack.

Rationale

While Spack is already quite easy to clone and deploy on a per-user bases, friction can be reduced by enabling Spack to be installed via a
package manager. Further, the changes necessary to do so have significant overlap with the use case of "module load spack" on HPC systems, a
feature that is also (less widely but significantly) desired. See Carson's
paper for details on a prototype of that functionality.

Description

This is a work in progress, as this requires a number of changes. A beginning list includes:

• Vendoring of packages vs. requirements.txt
• Project layout requirements for PyPI packages while respecting existing structure
• Package naming (i.e., spack is taken in PyPI)
• Permissions with shared installations (in progress, Shared spack #47615)
• Integration of shared system, shared project, and user-specific install trees via upstreams integration

Additional information

This issue is related to several other issues, PRs, and discussion threads over a long period of time, including the following:

• https://groups.google.com/g/spack/c/HLvJNPaDUlc
• Release Spack on PyPI #1385
• feature: sharing a spack instance #11871
• Shared spack #47615

The aim of this issue is to unify effort and ideas while tracking progress.

General information

• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe this is not a duplicate