HPSF Conference 2025

High Energy Physics (HEP) and Nuclear Physics (NP) experiments at accelerators facilities use modular software stacks which evolve over the decades-long lifetimes of these efforts. These software stacks have complex dependency trees, often reaching depths of O(50) levels and containing O(1000) nodes, with detailed versioning constraints. Reproducibility requirements demand that previous versions and their dependencies can be recalled on newer hardware architectures. The software stacks are deployed on computing centers around the world, as part of computing grids for high throughput computing and (increasingly) high performance computing. Current tools for managing these stacks have been around for years, but do not always have support for newer computing practices (containerization, integration in development workflows, heterogeneous architectures, deployment to shared file systems such as CernVM-FS). In this session, I will give an overview of the packaging solutions used in HEP and NP, and compare them with Spack in terms of functionality, adaptability, and usability.