@junghans @marvinbernhardt not sure about the spack release maintenance policies, but it would be good to backport this as much as possible to maintained releases since it can cause up to ~20% performance loss which I'm sure many will be happy to avoid.

Waiting for maintainers opinion on this. Honestly I'd be in favor of changing this in CMakePackage in general slightly_smiling_face

That will still not change the default for cases where default="RelWithDebInfo" is specified in package.py, right (there are a few other cases other than GROMACS).

I'd be curious to know what lead to this strange choice of RelWithDebInfo build type as default instead of using whatever is the respective software's cmake default?

@pszi1ard See #22918 and links therein

@pszi1ard See #22918 and links therein

Thanks for the link. The default is in this case not inherited but explicitly set (overriding the GROMACS default and with causing the reported performance loss), and it is still not clear what is the reasoning behind this choice.