I'd like to be able to create a Spack package, e.g. my-stuff, that does nothing on its own but depends on all of the various things, specified as I want them, so that when I spack install my-stuff it pulls in emacs and R and ....

I'm currently doing something like Erik Schnetter put forth.

I imagine I could create a fake tarball (or a tarball with a bit of documentation) but then I'd have to bump it's version every time I change the list of dependencies and keep the package.py and tarball in sync.

Or I could probably override the definitions of Package's fetch and install so that they didn't do anything interesting, but a quick glance shows me more going on around there than I expected.