Anaconda surveyed the conda community in late 2022. This post reviews what we learned from that survey and how it is impacting the future directions of conda.

Around the same time, the Python Software Foundation published the results of their (much, much bigger) Python Packaging Survey. The two surveys asked some similar questions and some distinct ones. We include insights from the PSF survey when they are particularly relevant to the conda community.

We are pleased to announce that the conda community has migrated our chat rooms to the Matrix/Element platform. For the first time since the conda ecosystem was young, every conda-related chat room is now easily accessible on one platform.

Matrix and Element have been around for a couple of years, and are used widely by communities like ours. Let's dive in:

Conda Announce is a new mailing list for announcements and news relevant to the conda ecosystem and community.

If you want to stay informed about software releases, new features, upcoming events, and other community news then this is the list for you.

The mailing list is moderated and low-volume: Most news will go out in monthly summary posts. (Our goal is to keep the list volume low enough, and the content relevant enough, that you don’t feel a need to filter it out of your inbox.)

See:

• Conda Announce mailing list home
• Subscribe
• List Archive

We hope to see you online!

The conda Organization is delighted to announce that we are now fiscally sponsored by NumFOCUS. This will enable conda to apply for grants, accept and distribute funds, manage trademarks and own web domains with a distinct legal standing.

This milestone demonstrates how far the organization has come in creating an effective open source community with capable governance processes on par with other established projects. With this sponsorship comes the promise of further development - such as transitioning into full openness within GitHub – so stay tuned!

The latest conda release is now available. To update run:

conda install -n base conda=22.11.1

This release includes a number of improvements including:

• 🚅 Making the conda-libmamba-solver generally available. See the Getting Started Guide .
• 🏎 Parallel package downloads.
• 🧩 A new plugin framework. See the conda Plugin Docs and the Plugin Templates for examples.

Check out the 🎥 release video (!) and the changelog for the complete list of improvements.

conda-build is a conda package for building your own packages for conda and other package managers.

To install conda-build run

conda install conda-build

If you already have it installed, you can upgrade to the newest version with

conda upgrade conda-build

The 3.23.0 and 3.23.1 releases have several updates:

• Outputs now support both script and files arguments. When both script and an explicit file list are given, the script is run first and then the files given in the explicit file list are packaged. (#4281)
• Add overlinking_ignore_patterns build parameter to speed up recipes where it is not helpful. (#4576)
• Add win-arm64 as a recognized platform (subdir). (#4579)
• Add opt-in environment variable to run conda in isolated mode (python -I -m conda) when invoked from conda-build. This is necessary to fix an issue when packaging conda itself. Alternative solutions (see #4628) are under investigation, so the current implementation will likely change. (#4604, #4625)
• Refactored conda_build.convert.update_lib_contents to use pathlib.Path. Mark test_cli.test_convert as xfail on Windows (something with the GitHub Windows Runner makes this particularly flaky). (#4619, #4626)

See the conda-build documentation for more on how to use it to create packages.

Hey everyone!

Im very proud to announce the launch of prefix.dev, a fast conda package search website with many more features to come.

For more information about prefix.dev the company and the website see here.

If you get the time to check it out, Im very curious to your thoughts! Would also love to see if we can work together with the community here!

Cheers! Bas Zalmstra

Here's a summary of some things that have gone on around the web this week:

• Tell us how you use conda and win a prize too.
• PyPy and conda-forge
• conda-forge Releases Python 3.8.14, 3.9.14, and 3.10.7
• Mamba Release 1.0

We are pleased to announce the launch of the conda Community Forum, a gathering place for questions, answers, and discussion about the conda ecosystem.

We hope the forum will be a key component of that ecosystem, and will become the goto place for people with questions about conda & friends.

Special announcement​

If you have been following the conda project previously, you will notice a change in our version number for this release. We have officially switched to the CalVer versioning system as agreed upon in CEP 8 (Conda Enhancement Proposal).

Please read that CEP for more information, but here is a quick synopsis. We hope that this versioning system and our release schedule will help make our releases more predictable and transparent to the community going forward. We are now committed to making at least one release every two months, but keep in mind that we can (and most likely will) be making minor version releases within this window.