Summary

In spack v0.18.1 (and not only), there is spack diff however that is limited in its functionality. It would be very nice to be able to diff arbitrary specs from files

Rationale

One could be running spack on two different machines and experiencing different behaviors. The administrator could save the spec from one machine into a file, bring it to the other machine and run spack diff on that file to compare it with the local one (which might be exported to a file too -- the mechanics are unimportant).

Similarly, one could more easily diff specs from separate environments on the same spack installation.

Description of an alternative

Manually or semi-manually running various diff tools on the output of spack spec and/or on the content of the lock files for environments

Additional information

@scheibelp this is the followup as it was discussed at today's concall

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