What to do with "pure" pypi packages?

There are a lot of python pacakges that “jsut work” with plain old:

pip install the_package

These are pure python packages with non-complex dependencies.

So some folks use a mixture of conda and pip to install stuff, but this gets ugly with the dependency resolution, etc.

I’ve dealt with this so far by making conda packages for these, but there are a LOT of them – and as this is an easy lift, it would be do-able to automate it all. I’ve always thought that Anaconda-org should have a PyPi bridge – someone looks for a package, it’s not there, it looks for a pypi package and builds a conda pacakge on the fly and away we go!

But that wold require Continuum to do it, and maybe would be too much magic.

But maybe we could have a set of conda packages that are auto-built from PyPi (conda skeleton mostly works) and then have an automated system that goes through and looks to see if there are newer versions of any of them, and auto-update those. So in theory, all we’d need to do by hand was keep a list of packages to monitor (probably keep up with whether it had been added to the default channel).

I started down this track before I discovered obvious-ci – running conda skeleton, and building the package on the fly. Then I decided that it was easier to simply maintain by hand the half a dozen packages I needed. But it would be nice to cover a much larger range of packages…

Thoughts?

[takluyver]

Now that Travis OSX builds are waiting in the queue for many hours to complete a build, I feel like reminding people that wheel2conda can convert a pure-Python wheel to a set of conda packages on a single system in a few seconds.

It’s at a prototype stage at the moment, and it would need more work to turn it into a complete solution, but if we’re routinely going to be waiting hours for an OSX buildbot, building OSX packages from Linux seems rather attractive. And if we could do this for all the pure Python packages, it could free up conda-forge’s ration of OSX buildbots to build more complex packages.

[ocefpaf]

gets ugly with the dependency resolution, etc.

I am not so sure this is as ugly as a before [citation needed]. The integration with pip has improved a lot. (Even Linux distros are now allowing a mixture of PyPI and system packages!)

Maybe we are just missing something like:

conda install --from pypi <some package>