CSPICE-Feedstock Update Notice 09/22/25, possible install impacts for ISIS

[AndrewAnnex]

Hello ISIS team,

I am planning to merge a major overhaul to the cspice-feedstock that will update the feedstock to use a new CMake-based build recipe that I have written. The PR with this change is here: conda-forge/cspice-feedstock#44

I will merge this update to the feedstock on 09/22/25.

The new CMake recipe is vastly superior to the older script based methods, and I've written it with the aim to follow best practices with modern cmake, so find_packages should work and make things much easier for downstream packages such as ISIS.

This issue serves as a notice to this impending change to the feedstock. From previous/related issues to this feedstock, I am aware that ISIS in the past had some sensitivities to the shared library name for cspice, and I believe some of those issues have been fixed, but out of an abundance of caution, I am posting this issue for the ISIS devs to be aware of this pending change and provide ample opportunity for corrective actions.

Any feedback or corrections to the CMake recipe can be made in this period as well by contributing issues and pr's to the repo linked above.

For corrective actions, simply pinning older versions to older cspice feedstock builds should be sufficient.

Related issues/PRs:
#5854
#5083
#5080
#5136
#5133
conda-forge/cspice-feedstock#33

[Kelvinrr]

@chkim-usgs, we should probably pin CSPICE for both ISIS and SpiceQL this Friday. Next support sprint, we can look into updating ISIS to use the new CMake files. We also would want someone to look at using the CMake Conf files (maybe using SpiceQL since it's simpler) and see if it works as expected/give feedback. This would entail installing CSPICE with the CMake files and see if we can build SpiceQL without needing findCSpice.cmake.

[Kelvinrr]

Seems like Christine was able to use the changes as epected, once it merges we can update our recipes during the next support sprint early October.

[AndrewAnnex]

the feedstock has been updated so this issue could be closed @Kelvinrr

[acpaquette]

@AndrewAnnex We are running into an issue with the new build. Namely that the new build only ships with libcspice.67.0.0.dylib and libcspice.dylib. This brakes almost all previous ISIS builds as they link against libcspice.67.dylib. Is there a way that we could do a new build of cspice that creates a symbolic link from libcspice.67.0.0.dylib to libcspice.67.dylib?

[AndrewAnnex]

@acpaquette I would prefer if the older builds could be updated to pin to the older builds of the feedstock, or if the cmake of those older builds could be updated to use the new cspice targets created by the new cmake recipe.

I'll investigate a change to create the appropriate symlink but I am not sure if it will work while following cmake best practices. But feedback on the cmake recipe was solicited already at the top of this issue.

[Kelvinrr]

@AndrewAnnex Updating all the old recipes is not realistically feasible (or rather, not practical). That would mean updating 10 years of ISIS releases. CMake best practices don't mean anything if they break builds for dependencies. Alternatively, it might be simpler to change the version of CSPICE from 67.0.0 to 67, as far as I know, CSPICE does not use semantic versioning and uses 00## for all its versions. I think simply using the whole number component is appropriate.

[AndrewAnnex]

Is it not possible to update the build pins for these older recipes? Or simply install the pinned cspice build prior to installing isis?

[Kelvinrr]

Is it not possible to update the build pins for these older recipes? Or simply install the pinned cspice build prior to installing isis?

The former requires creating a new conda-recipe and re-uploading for every version (or at the very least, updating all their metadata), the latter requires extra instruction to users who sometimes already struggle trying to install ISIS. IMHO, the simplest thing would be to change 67.0.0 -> 67, it matches how NAIF versions the toolkit and is backwards compatible.