Committed lockfiles pinned gcc as a host-path external (from spack compiler
find), which is not portable across runners and broke CI. Cache the gcc
compiler itself as a buildcache node instead, so CI pulls it (~1 min) rather
than building it from source (~1 h).
- push the freshly-built gcc node in setup-deps BEFORE spack compiler find
(which marks it external and excludes it from buildcache push), gated behind
a push-gcc input used only by the buildcache workflow
- drop the committed-lockfile approach: remove test/ci/locks, the lockfile
install path in setup-deps, and the lockfile export in the buildcache workflow
- drop the ignored ref input from setup-spack (v3 renamed it to spack_ref)
Reusing concretization between the weekly buildcache (fresh) and weekday CI
(reuse) can drift if runner externals change, causing avoidable cache misses.
- setup-deps installs from test/ci/locks/<env>-gcc<N>.lock when it exists,
skipping concretization for byte-identical hashes; falls back to the spec
yaml otherwise
- buildcache exports each env's spack.lock as a downloadable artifact so the
lockfiles can be regenerated on the ubuntu-24.04 runner and committed
- document the manual regeneration flow in test/ci/locks/README.md
gcc was built from source (~58 min/job) because the FairMQ buildcache mirror
is only configured inside the env yaml, while gcc is installed before the env
is created.
- register the mirror globally after spack setup so "Install GCC" pulls the
compiler as a binary
- pin runners to ubuntu-24.04 so the weekly buildcache and weekday CI share an
image and concretize to matching hashes
- bump setup-spack to v3 to match the update-index job
Use JSON output and jq to select the newest installed gcc version
when multiple versions match, avoiding conflicts between system and
spack-installed compilers.
