Re: Conda environments and reproducibility

[Thibault Lestang <t.lestang@imperial.ac.uk>]

Thanks for your answer Konrad.

Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@cnrs.fr> writes:

> There may be other causes for the conda problem cited, I don't claim
> to be an authority of conda! After the MOOC experience, I have never
> used conda again.

That's fair enough. Conda & pip are everywhere around me, and I'd like
to form an accurate picture of their shotcomings before mentioning
alternative approaches to people who use these tools everyday!

>> Is it the case that someone at Anaconda would modify some package,
>> keeping the same version tag and other identifiers used by conda, whilst
>> at the same time marking this package as incompatible with packages it
>> was previously compatible with?
>
> That's in a way what happened in my scenario: rebuilding with a new
> compilation infrastructure produces different packages that share
> version numbers and tags with the prior ones.

Okay - this is an explanation I can understand. A better approach
would have been /not/ to overwrite existing package binaries with new
ones produced from the new infrastructure.

In other words, include whatever information is needed to fully describe
the compilation infrastructure in the conda package metadata -- and
therefore make sure that a new infrastructure produces /new/ packages.

Best,
Thibault