2023-06-21 Conda Community Meeting

Zoom link · What time is the meeting in my time zone

Various parts of the conda community gather on a regular basis. This meeting brings together all of these sub-communities for a community wide call.

Attendees

Name	Initials	Affiliation	GH Username
Bianca Henderson	BH	Anaconda	beeankha
Katherine Kinnaman	KK	Anaconda	kathatherine
Cheng H. Lee	CHL	Anaconda/cf	chenghlee
Ken Odegard	KO	Anaconda	kenodegard
Katherine Abrikian	KCA	Anaconda	kalawac
Filipe Fernandes	FF	conda-forge	ocefpaf
Jesse Wiles	JW	Anaconda	jessewiles
Marcel Bargull	MB	Bioconda/cf	mbargull
Jaime Rodríguez-Guerra	JRG	Quansight/cf	jaimergp

13 people in total

Introductions

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Announcements

• (CHL) Still waiting to hear back about SciPy 2023 sprint

New Agenda Items

• (DPC) Newsletter is coming!
  • Anything missing?
• (JRG) Let's think about conda-standalone :)
  • Distribution of conda as a pyinstaller application
  • Provides executable that ....
  • Problem is that it is maintained separately by a different team and is not up to date with conda.
  • This delay is now causing problems
  • e.g new metadata format.
  • Suggest that we turn on cron jobs to run this regularly (?)
  • CF can't do this, due to no way to cross-compile to osx-arm64
  • Micromamba is an alternative. Implements the important APIs.
    • Currently some difference; e.g., adding short cuts
  • Should we abandon standalone?
  • CEP is being drafted
• (WV) Rust port of libsolv
  • Live demo!
  • Sidestep into presenting what SAT solvers do. Background knowledge for the whole community
  • Wolf: A blog post is coming! Past that he's not committing ...
• (WV) new recipe spec discussion - how should we proceed?
  • The new YAML format: https://github.com/conda-incubator/ceps/pull/54
  • All the keys & values: https://github.com/conda-incubator/ceps/pull/56
  • New tests: https://github.com/conda-incubator/ceps/pull/57
  • Voting? Have an implementation, or not?
    • Could propose it as a "draft" that will likely be revised while implementing.
• (KCA) Shell plugins / package activation and deactivation scripts:
  • Plugins may use os.execve, which would activate the environment in a new shell process.
  • As a result, it's possible to just exit the shell instead of deactivating
  • This would mean not re-running deactivation/activation scripts.
  • Are package activation or deactivation scripts likely to write to file?
  • CEP being drafted, 2 PRs available (1 in draft)
  • Discussion:
    • better to run the scripts
    • interest in seeing CEP
    • concern: may lose advantages of staying within same shell process for activation; can't deprecate current model
    • benefit: simplify mental model of conda; if we start new process, free to do a lot of things we can't do now
    • to think about: how can we handle in-script activations with new processes?
• (JRG) Submitted a SDG for conda/schemas.
  • Small development grant at NumFOCUS.
  • Revamp schemas repo to be source of truth.
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