spack/lib/spack
Harmen Stoppels c3eaf4d6cf
Support for prereleases (#43140)
This adds support for prereleases. Alpha, beta and release candidate
suffixes are ordered in the intuitive way:

```
1.2.0-alpha < 1.2.0-alpha.1 < 1.2.0-beta.2 < 1.2.0-rc.3 < 1.2.0 < 1.2.0-xyz
```

Alpha, beta and rc prereleases are defined as follows: split the version
string into components like before (on delimiters and string boundaries).
If there's a string component `alpha`, `beta` or `rc` followed by an optional
numeric component at the end, then the version is prerelease.

So `1.2.0-alpha.1 == 1.2.0alpha1 == 1.2.0.alpha1` are all the same, as usual.

The strings `alpha`, `beta` and `rc` are chosen because they match semver,
they are sufficiently long to be unambiguous, and and all contain at least
one non-hex character so distinguish them from shasum/digest type suffixes.

The comparison key is now stored as `(release_tuple, prerelease_tuple)`, so in
the above example:

```
((1,2,0),(ALPHA,)) < ((1,2,0),(ALPHA,1)) < ((1,2,0),(BETA,2)) < ((1,2,0),(RC,3)) < ((1,2,0),(FINAL,)) < ((1,2,0,"xyz"), (FINAL,))
```

The version ranges `@1.2.0:` and `@:1.1` do *not* include prereleases of
`1.2.0`.

So for packaging, if the `1.2.0alpha` and `1.2.0` versions have the same constraints on
dependencies, it's best to write

```python
depends_on("x@1:", when="@1.2.0alpha:")
```

However, `@1.2:` does include `1.2.0alpha`. This is because Spack considers
`1.2 < 1.2.0` as distinct versions, with `1.2 < 1.2.0alpha < 1.2.0` as a consequence.

Alternatively, the above `depends_on` statement can thus be written

```python
depends_on("x@1:", when="@1.2:")
```

which can be useful too. A short-hand to include prereleases, but you
can still be explicit to exclude the prerelease by specifying the patch version
number.

### Concretization

Concretization uses a different version order than `<`. Prereleases are ordered
between final releases and develop versions. That way, users should not
have to set `preferred=True` on every final release if they add just one
prerelease to a package. The concretizer is unlikely to pick a prerelease when
final releases are possible.

### Limitations

1. You can't express a range that includes all alpha release but excludes all beta
   releases. Only alternative is good old repeated nines: `@:1.2.0alpha99`.

2. The Python ecosystem defaults to `a`, `b`, `rc` strings, so translation of Python versions to
   Spack versions requires expansion to `alpha`, `beta`, `rc`. It's mildly annoying, because
   this means we may need to compute URLs differently (not done in this commit).

### Hash

Care is taken not to break hashes of versions that do not have a prerelease
suffix.
2024-03-22 23:30:32 +01:00
..
docs Support for prereleases (#43140) 2024-03-22 23:30:32 +01:00
env Revert "cc: work around -v split between ld and ccld" (#42196) 2024-01-19 17:59:41 +01:00
external Update archspec to v0.2.3 (#42854) 2024-03-12 09:31:15 +01:00
llnl python wheels: do not "expand" (#43317) 2024-03-22 16:57:46 +01:00
spack Support for prereleases (#43140) 2024-03-22 23:30:32 +01:00
spack_installable Update copyright year to 2024 (#41919) 2024-01-02 09:21:30 +01:00