Feature request: standalone distribution variant for nextflow package

[ebagrenrut]

@dialvarezs , @marcodelapierre :

I'm interested in your thoughts as maintainers of the nextflow package. At my site, we have been maintaining an internal nextflow package that installs the standalone distribution binary instead of the release binary. We prefer the standalone binary as we run a lot of Nextflow pipelines, and having many of the plugins available at launch removes potential points of failure and speeds up the Nextflow launch.

Rather than continue to maintain our own internal package, I'm interested in modifying the nextflow package in the spack-packages repo to include a variant (perhaps standalone or dist) that, when true, would instead fetch the standalone distribution. Do you have any objections to such a variant? If not, I will work on a pull-request.

[dialvarezs]

Hi @ebagrenrut , that makes sense to me. To be honest, personally I was not aware of the change from "-all" to "-dist". The "-all" version didn't support 3rd party plugins, that's why we were using the non-self contained version. But the new standalone distribution doesn't have that drawback, it makes perfect sense to install that version instead.

[ebagrenrut]

Resolved by #2879

[marcodelapierre]

Hi @ebagrenrut , only saw this now after a holiday break, sounds like a great idea to me as well.