Using the develop branch from today, I attempted to install a package from a .yaml file on disk, using the -f <yaml_file> option to spack install. Instead of installing the package, spack did not install anything or give any error information.

I did a little debugging, and inside lib/spack/spack/cmd/install.py, at the very bottom, the variable abstract_specs is an empty list, while specs is a list populated with a single item from the yaml file. Since those are zipped together before iterating to install, the zipped result is empty, and thus there is nothing to install.

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Save a yaml file for a concrete spec:

from spack.spec import Spec
s = Spec('zlib`)
s.concretize()
with open('/tmp/zlib.yaml`, 'w') as fd:
    fd.write(s.to_yaml(all_deps=True)

In my case, that generated the following file (/tmp/zlib.yaml):

spec:
- zlib:
    version: 1.2.11
    arch:
      platform: linux
      platform_os: ubuntu16.04
      target: x86_64
    compiler:
      name: gcc
      version: 5.5.0
    namespace: builtin
    parameters:
      optimize: true
      pic: true
      shared: true
      cflags: []
      cppflags: []
      cxxflags: []
      fflags: []
      ldflags: []
      ldlibs: []
    hash: omy635k24jq6hpqhkfvnqykyee6qami2

Now attempting to install that version of zlib from the file:

spack -d -v install -f /tmp/zlib.yaml 
==> Reading config file /data/scott/projects/spack/etc/spack/defaults/modules.yaml
==> Reading config file /data/scott/projects/spack/etc/spack/defaults/linux/modules.yaml
==> Reading config file /data/scott/projects/spack/etc/spack/defaults/config.yaml
==> Reading config file /home/scott/.spack/config.yaml

Now check if it got installed:

spack find
==> 0 installed packages

Information on your system

In case it's not clear from the zlib.yaml contents above, this happened on Ubuntu 16.04 w/ architecture x86_64.