Add spack build testing

[georghammerl]

Description and Context

Add weekly test of several spack build configurations for different operating system versions (currently ubuntu 24.04 and ubuntu 26.04). As a smoke test, a single test file, namely tests/tutorials/poisson/tutorial_poisson_thermo.4C.yaml is run after the build.

At the moment, only the the latest release known in the spack_repo is tested. An issue is opened if something fails.

Related Issues and Pull Requests

Disclosure of AI assistance

This script was created by Claude Sonnet 5.0

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Adds weekly Spack build and smoke testing across Ubuntu and optional dependency configurations.

Changes:

• Adds six OS/variant build combinations.
• Runs a Poisson tutorial smoke test.
• Uploads diagnostics and reports scheduled failures through GitHub issues.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 1 out of 1 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 1 out of 1 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

[georghammerl]

There are several PRs in the spack-packages repo open which are necessary to get things running here:

• 4c-multiphysics: enable python support spack/spack-packages#6114
• 4c-multiphysics: add v2026.3.0 and tpl update spack/spack-packages#6252
• readline: fetch patches via ftpmirror.gnu.org instead of ftp.gnu.org spack/spack-packages#6261

Need to wait until they are merged for further testing, therefore draft mode for now.

[davidrudlstorfer]

Should this be added? We also have this nowhere else in our testing.

I think it would make sense to create this repo wide for all test suites and therefore create a reusable action for this

[georghammerl]

This does not to be added. Please feel free to adjust or make a suggestion how to generalize. Thanks already @davidrudlstorfer

[davidrudlstorfer]

Something like this could work

Reusable action

name: Report nightly test failure
description: Create or update a GitHub issue when a nightly test fails

inputs:
  title:
    description: Title of the failure issue
    required: true

  body:
    description: Initial body of the failure issue
    required: true

  labels:
    description: Comma-separated list of issue labels
    required: true

runs:
  using: composite
  steps:
    - name: Create or update issue
      uses: actions/github-script@v7
      with:
        script: |
          const title = `${{ inputs.title }}`;
          const body = `${{ inputs.body }}`;
          const labels = `${{ inputs.labels }}`.split(",").map(label => label.trim());

          const runUrl =
            `${context.serverUrl}/${context.repo.owner}/${context.repo.repo}/actions/runs/${context.runId}`;

          const { data: existingIssues } = await github.rest.issues.listForRepo({
            owner: context.repo.owner,
            repo: context.repo.repo,
            state: "open",
            labels: labels.join(","),
          });

          const existing = existingIssues.find(
            (issue) => issue.title === title
          );

          const timestamp = new Date().toISOString();

          const note = [
            `- \`${timestamp}\`: failed run [#${context.runNumber}](${runUrl}) `,
            `(commit ${context.sha.substring(0, 8)}, ref \`${context.ref}\`)`,
          ].join("");

          if (existing) {
            await github.rest.issues.createComment({
              owner: context.repo.owner,
              repo: context.repo.repo,
              issue_number: existing.number,
              body: note,
            });

            core.info(`Added a comment to existing issue #${existing.number}`);
          } else {
            const issueBody = [
              body,
              "",
              note,
              "",
              "This issue is filed/updated automatically. Please close it once the underlying problem is fixed; " +
                "a new one will be filed automatically if it fails again.",
            ].join("\n");

            const created = await github.rest.issues.create({
              owner: context.repo.owner,
              repo: context.repo.repo,
              title,
              body: issueBody,
              labels,
            });

            core.info(`Filed new issue #${created.data.number}`);
          }

and then this workflow simplifies to

report-failure:
  needs: spack-build
  if: failure() && github.event_name == 'schedule'
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  permissions:
    issues: write

  steps:
    - uses: ./.github/actions/report-nightly-failure
      with:
        title: "Scheduled Spack build test is failing"
        labels: "github_actions,type: bug report"
        body: |
          The scheduled **Spack build test** workflow failed.

          This workflow builds the latest official 4C release via the
          [`4c-multiphysics` Spack package](https://packages.spack.io/package.html?name=4c-multiphysics)
          across several OS/variant combinations and runs a smoke test against the result.

          A failure here typically indicates one of:

          - The `4c-multiphysics` Spack package (or one of its dependencies) needs to be updated for the latest 4C release.
          - A regression in 4C's build system that only shows up outside of the in-repo Docker-based CI.
          - A transient upstream Spack/buildcache issue.

Then it should be possible to reuse this for all the other nightly workflows as well.

(AI helped writing the files, some iterations were necessary no get to a meaningful state)