2021-05-11 Conda Community Meeting

Attendees

Name	Initials	Affiliation	GH Username
Cheng H. Lee	CHL	Anaconda	@chenghlee
Marcel Bargull	MB	Bioconda/cf	@mbargull
CJ Wright	CJ	Citadel/cf	@CJ-Wright
Sebastien Awwad	SA	Anaconda	@awwad

Anaconda Individual Edition 2021.04 releasing this week. In addition to updates, adds linux-aarch64 (Neoverse N1/N2) and linux-s390x as supported platforms.
Anaconda (distro & platform) is hiring.
Citadel (HPC env and pkg management, contact CJ), is hiring.

Expect conda 4.10.2 release in the next week or two.
- Roadmap: https://github.com/conda/conda/milestone/50
- conda env create (snakemake, conda lock) vs conda create
  - env spec files seem preferred (channels, pip, etc.)
  - micromamba create reads yaml files
    - includes (undocumented) extension that allows platform-specific selection
    - (CHL) willing to pull that into conda itself; document in environment schema.
CentOS (8) EOL
- Anaconda "defaults": supporting CentOS 7 (glibc 2.17) as default target until it hits EOL in 2024. If newer glibc needed to build something, will use older, supported versions of Ubuntu or Debian.
- conda-forge discussion: https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/1432
  - yum requirements, CDTs -> but we can wait till 2024
- consider other community-maintained alternatives like Rocky Linux
- commercial interest in staying on RHEL (or other rpm-based distros)
- adding __glibc run constrains
  - explicit in recipes; run_exports in compiler, sysroot packages; feature in conda build
  - need to consider what manylinux, other HPC centers, other communities (e.g., nix; R) plan to do
  - roll our own glibc? Need to consider patches, kernels, etc.
Thinking through how to handle compatibility with system packages (glibc, X11, etc.)
yanked vs broken: ways to remove or hide packages from the ecosystem
repodata timestamping (or other version management) for reproducibility --- bioconda