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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

As you have experience with pyenv, pipenv and poetry, you might be able to answer: Why not conda?

I've been using conda since ~4 years now, and every single complaint lodged against any of the other package managers was never an issue with conda in the first place. And yet, it seems like there's a SEP field around it and people just ignore its existence?

In this thread, for the first time, I've seen someone mention that you might have problem porting a conda env from a Mac to Linux - never had that problem myself, but I guess it's possible; But that's easily solvable, and certainly does not require a new package manager?

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That's about as long as I've been using conda. But I avoid it whenever I can because of a variety of gripes. The two biggest are the following:

1. On Lustre file systems, 'Solving environment...' can take minutes. I don't like waiting minutes to provide permission to install packages.

2. A lot of conda packages are broken. It's managed by maintainers, and unfortunately, some people maintaining believe that if it works on their machine, it will work elsewhere. Since I'm tired of ABI and runtime linking errors, I often just install from source.

conda doesn't require you to use conda packages; pip installs are perfectly integrated.

w.r.t lustre - can't comment about that; I prefer local file systems for development for various reasons (most importantly: mmaping huge local files is 10x to 100x more efficient than through networked filing systems).

Because publishing a package on PyPI is trivial compared to publishing on the Anaconda cloud. For the latter, you need to build your package for every platform and Python version you want to support. So sou need to setup some CI. This is just such an overkill for a pure-Python package. It makes a lot of sense for a project with a nontrivial C extension though, and I do build a conda package for one such project of mine. For everything else, I publish just on PyPI.

Are you aware that Conda fully supports and integrates pip?

Publish on PyPI, it's just as usable in Conda to everyone.

But assuming you for some reason insist on publishing to the system you use - the vast majority of users don't ever publish a package; what's stopping them from using Conda?

I admit I have never tried to publish anything on the Anaconda cloud, but I'm a bit surprised - I was under the impression that publishing pure python packages is simple; The requirement to do it for different python versions, though, seems perfectly warranted to me - and indeed, I ran into issues with packages on PyPI not working on specific versions (but nowhere listed as such).

There's no such requirement at all, but it's a noble goal and one every package developer should strive for.

Conda has no lockfile. The management commands are horrible to use and inconsistent. The "pip integration" is just "produce a requirements.txt and install it", so unless you're using some conda only dependency (thankfully those are few and far between) what's the point?

Conda is also annoyingly outside the python ecosystem. It seems to want to replace pip/pypi instead of working with it.

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