ci: populate caches in before script (#38762)

* ci: run spack list in power ci

Let's see if Spack itself is the bottleneck in CI...

* rebuild curl in CI

* more of the same please!

* drop the profiler

* undo rebuildme test in ci variant

* add comment for posterity

* enable profiling

* trigger CI

* See how it goes now that perf regressions are fixed on develop

* try shorter poll intervals

* Revert "try shorter poll intervals"

This reverts commit d60c34ad3eceead0c13a5277cf8e783fd42b7458.

* Remove spec.format call in Database._get_matching_spec_key

* once more in ci please

* undo irrelevant changes

* run spack list in before script

* test in ci

* -:

* Undo CI testing

share/spack/gitlab/cloud_pipelines/configs/ci.yaml

@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@ ci:
 
   pipeline-gen:
   - build-job:
+      before_script-:
+      - - spack list --count  # ensure that spack's cache is populated
       script::
       - - spack compiler find
         - cd ${SPACK_CONCRETE_ENV_DIR}