If you change SPACK_TRANSITIVE_INCLUDE_DIRS to SPACK_INCLUDE_DIRS everywhere you should be able to have the same effect without losing functionality, and you can still delete the function causing the problem. Spack computes in other places the same thing that function was designed to compute.

So I'm not sure what the right fix is, either, but i'm hitting the same problem, ie., spack setup <pkg> not working because it'll complain about SPACK_DEPENDENCIES (and not with a very helpful error message).

==> Generating spconfig.py [camtimers@local%[email protected] build_type=RelWithDebInfo arch=linux-ubuntu18.04-haswell/prvk35b]
==> Error: 'SPACK_DEPENDENCIES'

FWIW, a workaround is to export SPACK_DEPENDENCIES="" first. But it looks like SPACK_DEPENDENCIES has been removed a long time ago except in this one place. I don't know what the correct fix is -- this one here looks like it'll fix the problem for me. I could also instead make a PR that just handles SPACK_DEPENDENCIES not being set in the environment gracefully, though that seems more like a workaround rather than a fix.

@cedricchevalier19 @germasch I suggest replacing SPACK_INCLUDE_DIRS with SPACK_TRANSITIVE_INCLUDE_DIRS everywhere it appears in $spack/lib/spack/spack/cmd/setup.py, in addition to the changes already in this branch. If you can push that to this branch, I can review it and get it merged.

Now spack setup properly exports SPACK_INCLUDE_DIRS into spconfig.py.