Add "default" configuration scope.

- Default scope is versioned with spack and can be overridden by site
  or user config.

- Default scope provides sensible default concretization preferences
  for all of Spack.

- per-platform concretization scope can be added later (to force a
  particular MPI on, e.g., Cray systems)

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/lib/spack/spack/config.py b/lib/spack/spack/config.py
index 3a66e9f2a6..8b5e96f97d 100644
--- a/lib/spack/spack/config.py
+++ b/lib/spack/spack/config.py
@@ -497,8 +497,15 @@ class ConfigScope(object):
         """Empty cached config information."""
         self.sections = {}
 
+"""Default configuration scope is the lowest-level scope. These are
+   versioned with Spack and can be overridden by sites or users."""
+ConfigScope('defaults', os.path.join(spack.etc_path, 'spack', 'defaults'))
 
-ConfigScope('site', os.path.join(spack.etc_path, 'spack')),
+"""Site configuration is per spack instance, for sites or projects.
+   No site-level configs should be checked into spack by default."""
+ConfigScope('site', os.path.join(spack.etc_path, 'spack'))
+
+"""User configuration can override both spack defaults and site config."""
 ConfigScope('user', os.path.expanduser('~/.spack'))