This PR does several things:
- [x] Allow any character to appear in the quoted values of variants and flags.
- [x] Allow easier passing of quoted flags on the command line, e.g. `cflags="-O2 -g"`.
- [x] Handle quoting better in spec output, using single quotes around double
quotes and vice versa.
- [x] Disallow spaces around `=` and `==` when parsing variants and flags.
## Motivation
This PR is motivated by the issues above and by ORNL's
[tips for launching at scale on Frontier](https://docs.olcf.ornl.gov/systems/frontier_user_guide.html#tips-for-launching-at-scale).
ORNL recommends using `sbcast --send-libs` to broadcast executables and their
libraries to compute nodes when running large jobs (e.g., 80k ranks). For an
executable named `exe`, `sbcast --send-libs` stores the needed libraries in a
directory alongside the executable called `exe_libs`. ORNL recommends pointing
`LD_LIBRARY_PATH` at that directory so that `exe` will find the local libraries and
not overwhelm the filesystem.
There are other ways to mitigate this problem:
* You could build with `RUNPATH` using `spack config add config:shared_linking:type:runpath`,
which would make `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` take precedence over Spack's `RUNPATHs`.
I don't recommend this one because `RUNPATH` can cause many other things to go wrong.
* You could use `spack config add config:shared_linking:bind:true`, added in #31948, which
will greatly reduce the filesystem load for large jobs by pointing `DT_NEEDED` entries in
ELF *directly* at the needed `.so` files instead of relying on `RPATH` search via soname.
I have not experimented with this at 80,000 ranks, but it should help quite a bit.
* You could use [Spindle](https://github.com/hpc/Spindle) (as LLNL does on its machines)
which should transparently fix this without any changes to your executable and without
any need to use `sbcast` or other tools.
But we want to support the `sbcast` use case as well.
## `sbcast` and Spack
Spack's `RPATHs` break the `sbcast` fix because they're considered with higher precedence
than `LD_LIBRARY_PATH`. So Spack applications will still end up hitting the shared filesystem
when searching for libraries. We can avoid this by injecting some `ldflags` in to the build, e.g.,
if were were going to launch, say, `LAMMPS` at scale, we could add another `RPATH`
specifically for use with `sbcast`:
spack install lammps ldflags='-Wl,-rpath=$ORIGIN/lmp_libs'
This will put the `lmp_libs` directory alongside `LAMMPS`'s `lmp` executable first in the
`RPATH`, so it will be searched before any directories on the shared filesystem.
## Issues with quoting
Before this PR, the command above would've errored out for two reasons:
1. `$` wasn't an allowed character in our spec parser.
2. You would've had to double quote the flags to get them to pass through correctly:
spack install lammps ldflags='"-Wl,-rpath=$ORIGIN/lmp_libs"'
This is ugly and I don't think many users will easily figure it out. The behavior was added in
#29282, and it improved parsing of specs passed as a single string, e.g.:
spack install 'lammps ldflags="-Wl,-rpath=$ORIGIN/lmp_libs"'
but a lot of users are naturally going to try to quote arguments *directly* on the command
line, without quoting their entire spec. #29282 used a heuristic to detect unquoted flags
and warn the user, but the warning could be confusing. In particular, if you wrote
`cflags="-O2 -g"` on the command line, it would break the flags up, warn, and tell you
that you could fix the issue by writing `cflags="-O2 -g"` even though you just wrote
that. It's telling you to *quote* that value, but the user has to know to double quote.
## New heuristic for quoted arguments from the CLI
There are only two places where we allow arbitrary quoted strings in specs: flags and
variant values, so this PR adds a simpler heuristic to the CLI parser: if an argument in
`sys.argv` starts with `name=...`, then we assume the whole argument is quoted.
This means you can write:
spack install bzip2 cflags="-O2 -g"
directly on the command line, without multiple levels of quoting. This also works:
spack install 'bzip2 cflags="-O2 -g"'
The only place where this heuristic runs into ambiguity is if you attempt to pass
anonymous specs that start with `name=...` as one large string. e.g., this will be
interpreted as one large flag value:
spack find 'cflags="-O2 -g" ~bar +baz'
This sets `cflags` to `"-O2 -g" ~bar +baz`, which is likely not what you wanted. You
can fix this easily by either removing the quotes:
spack find cflags="-O2 -g" ~bar +baz
Or by adding a space at the start, which has the same effect:
spack find ' cflags="-O2 -g" ~bar +baz'
You may wonder why we don't just look for quotes inside of flag arguments, and the
reason is that you *might* want them there. If you are passing arguments like:
spack install zlib cppflags="-D DEBUG_MSG1='quick fox' -D DEBUG_MSG2='lazy dog'"
You *need* the quotes there. So we've opted for one potentially confusing, but easily
fixed outcome vs. limiting what you can put in your quoted strings.
## Quotes in formatted spec output
In addition to being more lenient about characters accepted in quoted strings, this PR fixes
up spec formatting a bit. We now format quoted strings in specs with single quotes, unless
the string has a single quote in it, in which case we JSON-escape the string (i.e., we add
`\` before `"` and `\`).
zlib cflags='-D FOO="bar"'
zlib cflags="-D FOO='bar'"
zlib cflags="-D FOO='bar' BAR=\"baz\""
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