Organising the conda communities and establishing best practices.

We all love conda and there are many communities that build awesome packages that are easy to use. I would like to see more exchange between these communities to finally share more build-scripts, to develop one best-practice guide and finally to have channels that can be used together without breaking recipes - a list of trusted channels with similar guidelines.

For example the bioconda community - specialised on bioinformatic software. They have some very nice guides how to develop packages, they are reviewing and bulk-patches recipes if there are new features in conda to make the overall experience even better. ping @johanneskoester, @daler and @chapmanb from BioConda fame

Omnia has a lot of cheminformatic software and a nice build-box based on phusion/holy-build-box-64 + CUDA and AMD APP SDK. ping @kyleabeauchamp, @jchodera

With conda-forge there is now a new one and it would be great to get all interested people together to join forces here and don’t replicate our recipes or copy them from one channel to the other just to make them compatible.

Another point is that we probably want to move recipes to default at some point and deliver our work back to Continuum - so that we can benefit from each other.

I can imagine that we all form a group of trusted communities and channels and activate them by default in our unified build-box - or we have one giant community channel. All this I would like to discuss with everyone that is interested and come up with a plan how to make this happen 😃

What do you all think about this? As a next step I would like to create a doodle to find a meeting data where at least one representative from all communities can participate.

Many thanks to Continuum Analytics for there continues support and the awesome development behind scientific python and this package manager. ping @jakirkham @msarahan

[pelson]

Can I expect that conda-forge PRs are handled faster than on conda-recipes?

This was my expectation. One huge benefit of the bioconda model is that if you need a recipe in 30min you get get those. conda-forge is hopefully way faster than conda-recipes 😃

If you are proposing a new recipe, then you have to wait on one of the conda-forge “staged-recipes” maintainers.

If you are proposing an update to an existing recipe, then you have to wait on one of the feedstock maintainers (as listed in the recipe/meta.yaml).

If you are proposing an update to an existing recipe for which you are a maintainer, you are waiting on yourself (and maybe the CI to finish).

In general I’m keen to be very open about membership of the “staged-recipes” group. The important qualities of a maintainer in that team is an eye for detail, a feeling for what is “maintainable”, and shed loads of experience of reading and writing conda recipes. I suspect most people in this thread meet that criteria, and after proposing just 3 or 4 PRs which merge smoothly, I’d be happy to say that was a good candidate for membership (though with all the noise on conda-forge, it is probably necessary to ask, rather than have it suggested).

[pelson]

Just to say that I’m in favour of the single repos as it currently is in conda-forge/feedstocks

Thanks for the honesty. Technically conda-forge/staged-recipes is a many recipe repository too, it is just we’ve automated it so that recipes immediately get deleted and added to their own repository on merge. 😉

With that in mind, you may be aware of conda-build-all which is the tool we use in this repo to build all recipes in a single repo. It (and its predecessor ObviousCI) was the tool we used in IOOS and SciTools (amongst others) to build and upload to our respective channels. Because of staged-recipes dependence upon it, we are going to need to continue to maintain that capability, so if your looking for shared tooling for the single-repo many-recipe usecase, you might want to take a look.

As you’ve highlighted, even if you don’t favour the approach we have taken at conda-forge, there is still huge potential for us to collaborate so that we can collectively package in a consistent and coherent way. Your input so far has been exceptionally valuable, and long may it continue! 👍