Summary

Maybe this is already possible, but it seems that -C scopes are always read-only (ImmutableConfigScope), so I haven't found a way to provide a custom writeable scope.

Rationale

On CI machines that are not containerized (e.g., macOS, Windows), ensuring the CI jobs stay in a specific directory is key to keeping machines "clean". I'd like to tell Spack "never write to ~/.spack" and have it write its configurations elsewhere. Rewriting HOME is a sledgehammer that may have other unintended side effects (e.g., other tools not finding their configurations which are treated as read-only).

Description

Some way to add in a writeable scope at a higher precedence level than the user store. Maybe --config-scope-write or something?

Additional information

$ bin/spack --version
0.16.3-4938-e7c7f44bb6

General information

• I have run spack --version and reported the version of Spack
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe this is not a duplicate