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# System prepended metadata

title: 2024-05-18 PyCon 2024 Open Space

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# Conda Community Open Space

## Saturday May 18th 10am, Room 308

### Attendees

- Jannis (Principal Software Engineer)
- Dasha (Anaconda, Sr Open Soure Community Manager)
- Cheng (Anaconda, Software Engineer)
- Bianca (Anaconda, Software Engineer)
- Aaron (Chicago Trading Company)
    - Is attending the open space after talking with us at the booth on Friday the 17th
    - The company he works for found the upgrading/depency situations to be too unwiedly, but with conda the problem seemed like it might be resolved; howeve,r there are issues with build tools and tooling that seem tricky to solve
- Jeff (Indeed)
    - Python ecosystem lead, mostly using `pip`, `piptools`
    - Data science people use conda
    - Wants to learn how to get the two to work together
- Joel (Database Engineer)
    - Cleans data and does automations related to that
- Wolf (prefix.dev)
    - Has been in conda ecosystem for 4-ish years
    - Created mamba, pixi, rattler, etc.
- Tim (prefix.dev)
    - Helped created pixi
    - Worked on robotics policy
    - Had trouble being able to run other teams' code and found that conda was a good solution for it
    - Seems like every robotics company combines C++ with Python
    - Mentioned [ROS (Robotics Operating System)](https://www.ros.org/); Doug mentioned they do their updates in lockstep with Ubuntu
- Doug (MicroPython)
- Ana
- Curtis (Washington State U.)
- Vic
    - Teaches courses that use both Python and R
    - Working R must come from conda-forge (not from Anaconda `defaults`)
    - Population of people who can use conda + R more effectively
    - What if I want to do both Python and R (reticulate to combine the two)
    - `conda create -c main -n foo python=3.11`
    - `conda install -c conda-forge r`
    - (Wolf) Try [`pixi`](https://pixi.sh/latest/)!
    - Groundwater modeling - mostly done in Windows (`pixi` does not work super well on Windows)
    - R support in VSCode seems very good; VSCode uses conda to manage Python environments

## Topics that were Discussed

- Challenges:
    - Documentation
    - Build tools & tooling
- Ecosystem:
    - mamba: hybrid C++/Python
    - -> micromamba: pure C++
    - -> pixi: Rust
- We need to open a ticket to possibly disallow the use of `default` and `conda-forge` channels together (specifically in the channel config?)
- Aaron created this project to solve some of his issues with conda: https://github.com/AaronOpfer/conda_curation
- Channel configuration is confusing
    - E.g., when forced to use Artifactory
    - `channel_alias`
    - Artifactory says create virtual channel and dump everyting into single channel
    - Have to change everyone their conda configuation
    - Got written to `/etc/conda` -> had to go to Linux DevOps team to remove this configuration
    - On mutil-user machines...painful
    - Haven't updated conda since `v23.3.3`. Why?
        - use: mamba, mamba-build
        - updating mamba, boa, conda -> mamba-build fails
    - `mamba` installing on NFS home directories
    - Jannis: Should update to miniforge since mamba-forge is deprecated
- Will Julia packages eventually be in the fold?
    - Yes, this is something we're actively discussing and working on