conda is decent, but for some reason it seems to live in a weird parallel universe where people not in science have never heard about it.
While I'm generally happy with it, some gripes:
- Using it's own package format with its own repos means that for many (most) projects you can't get all dependencies from conda, but some from pypi as well.
- And it doesn't keep track of which files belong to which package. So package X will happily scribble over files installed by package Y, and vice versa, leading to either X or Y being silently broken depending on the order they were installed in! Argh! I mean, this is something dpkg/rpm/etc. figured out decades ago, it's not rocket science.
- The dependency solver seems a bit weird. Often when upgrading an environment, it will install the same version of a package with another 'build tag', then a few days later if you upgrade again, it will downgrade back to the previous build tag. Not sure if this is the fault of the dependency solver, or whether the problem is in the packages themselves.
- Similarly, there's a lot of mutual incompatibility in the repos. E.g. dependencies on openssl versions prevent upgrading, or require removal of some package etc. I think this is not so much the fault of the conda tool itself, but rather that Anaconda Inc. needs to be more picky wrt packaging policy. Again, Linux distros have been pretty good at this. E.g. https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ , https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/ .
PS: While I have above mentioned dpkg/rpm as examples to follow, it's not like those formats don't have problems either. https://nixos.org/nix/ and https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ are perhaps the most prominent examples of 'next generation' packaging systems solving some of the problems of the old-school dpkg/rpm approaches.