2021-10-27 Conda Community Meeting

Attendees

Name	Initials	Affiliation	GH Username
Cheng H. Lee	CHL	Anaconda/CF	@chenghlee
Filipe Fernandes	FF	CF	@ocefpaf
Marius van Niekerk	MvN	Voltron Data	@mariusvniekerk
John Kirkham	JK.	NVIDIA	@jakirkham

[CHL] Update on mamba/libsolv integration
- As of Monday, down to ~5 failing tests
- We should probably re-visit the solver behavior, especially assumptions and implicit constraints
  - mamba implemented track_features for down-weighting
  - track_features only ever used in Anaconda's free channel
  - https://www.anaconda.com/blog/understanding-and-improving-condas-performance:
    
    Prioritize solutions that minimize the number of “track_features” entries in the environment. Track_features are legacy metadata once used for lining up mkl and debug packages. They are deprecated in general, but are still sometimes used to effectively implement a default variant of a package by “weighing down” alternatives with track_features.
  - [CHL] okay with mamba never implementing track_features (already deprecated)
- libsolv: provides, recommends; optional deps; deps based on os; pip extras
- https://github.com/conda/conda/pull/10983
Proposed enhancements:
- [MvN,FF]: proposing a formal conda-lock spec
  - https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba/issues/1209
- Possibly move environment history file to JSON- or YAML-format
- New recipe format (boa)
[FF] pip build-in tree
- https://github.com/conda/conda-build/pull/4294 -> pip upstream not going solve it
- conda-build breaks with pytoml, poetry, etc.
- E.g., https://github.com/conda-forge/staged-recipes/pull/16643/files
  - work around: --use-deprecated=out-of-tree-build
CEP-8: draft implementation being worked on