Spack creates a separate process to do package installation. Different
operating systems and Python versions use different methods to create
it but up until Python 3.8 both Linux and Mac OS used "fork" (which
duplicates process memory, file descriptor table, etc.).
Python >= 3.8 on Mac OS prefers creating an entirely new process
(referred to as the "spawn" start method) because "fork" was found to
cause issues (in other words "spawn" is the default start method used
by multiprocessing.Process). Spack was dependent on the particular
behavior of fork to replicate process memory and transmit file
descriptors.
This PR refactors the Spack internals to support starting a child
process with the "spawn" method. To achieve this, it makes the
following changes:
- ensure that the package repository and other global state are
transmitted to the child process
- ensure that file descriptors are transmitted to the child process in
a way that works with multiprocessing and spawn
- make all the state needed for the build process and tests picklable
(package, stage, etc.)
- move a number of locally-defined functions into global scope so that
they can be pickled
- rework tests where needed to avoid using local functions
This PR also reworks sbang tests to work on macOS, where temporary
directories are deeper than the Linux sbang limit. We make the limit
platform-dependent (macOS supports 512-character shebangs)
See: #14102
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