Note... this needs #2694 to be useful in real life.

Does anyone have thoughts on this? I think it's a lot more interesting than #2705

I plan to look at this in the environments WG and after 0.10 but in general I think it's a good idea.

I wrote a similar patch for this in PR #6903 in Jan 2018, except that
I did the early option parsing in init.py directly from sys.argv[].

So, now I'm embarrassed that I didn't search the old PRs sufficiently.
(I think I searched for 'config' rather than 'scope'.)

Anyway, I'm confident that you know more about spack than I do and
your patch is exactly what I want. So, I'll bow out and close mine as
a duplicate.

Thanks, and be sure to nag Todd until his patch is committed.

@mwkrentel This functionality has now been incorporated as part of the larger Spack Environments project. I encourage you to take a gander at #7843 and try it out; I am currently building my software stack based on that PR.

In the meantime, I'm closing this PR: stacked scopes inside the Spack Environment are just nicer in so many ways that stacking them on the command line.