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Conda News, Issue #1!

· 7 min read
Dave Clements
Pinak Datta

Welcome to the first ever conda community newsletter! The newsletter will highlight recent and upcoming activity that is relevant to the conda community. This first issue highlights community gathering spaces, upcoming events, the new rattler library, channel updates from conda-forge and Bioconda, a summary or recent conda-related web content, and finally releases and announcements.

We are hoping these will become a semi-regular feature in the conda landscape going forward. If you have an item to include in a future newsletter, please let us know by posting it to the Conda Communications Matrix Channel or by creating an issue in the Conda Communications GitHub Repo.

Finally, if you want to be notified about these newsletters from the comfort of your inbox, please sign up for the Conda Announce Mailing list.

Happy reading,
The Editors

Community Gathering Spaces​

It has been a busy year for creating and consolidating online gathering spaces for the conda community. We now have a community website, a Q&A/forum site, a unified chat platform, a mailing list, and more. See Pinak Datta's recent post for a complete list and links.

Community calls​

Please join us every other week to learn what is going on in the conda community and to provide your input.

Upcoming events​

SciPy 2023 Conda & Friends Sprint, July 15-16, Austin​

Updated 2023/07/05

We have proposed a sprint for SciPy, and SciPy has told us:

we aren't planning to reject any projects that submit an application prior to the conference.

So...

The conda community will again be meeting for a two day sprint at SciPy 2023 in Austin, Texas for two days of collaborative work. Interested? Please add your name and topic ideas here.

Sprints are open to everyone who is interested in contributing to the various projects in the conda ecosystem (e.g. projects under the conda, conda-incubator, mamba-org, conda-forge, etc.), what we call "conda and friends".

First and foremost, the goal of conda community sprints is to grow the conda contributor community. We mean "contributor" in the broadest possible sense: not just code, but also documentation, bug reports, forum questions (and answers), community events, new tools and plugins, and of course, new pull requests for existing tools too.

PackagingCon 2023, October 26-28, Berlin​

PackagingCon 2023 brings together the software packaging community to present and discuss common challenges and unique solutions to software packaging. The conference is open to all packaging communities, including language-specific, OS-specific, and broader solutions such as conda.

Abstract submission and early registration are now open for PackagingCon.

PackagingCon 2023 will be held October 26-28 in Berlin, and will be a hybrid event. The call for submissions closes July 31. Early registration ends September 8, but (in-person) space is limited and you are encouraged to register early.

Rattler!​

rattler is a new collection of Rust libraries to work with conda packages made by the prefix.dev team!

  • rattler 0.3.0 just came out with lots of highlights, such as JLAP support, local file:// urls, and authenticated requests with the new rattler_networking. See the full (and impressive) changelog for more.

rattler-build is built on top of rattler to facilitate the creation of conda packages. It already works very well and is much faster than conda-build. To push this effort forward, we started multiple conda enhancement proposals. Engage with us and the conda community on a forward-looking YAML format that is easy to parse (pure YAML) and keeps most of the conda-build functionalities!

Community channel updates​

conda-forge​

conda-forge has a Google Summer of Code project to update the project website. Asmit Malakannnawar will be working on the update for the next few months. The update will provide an intuitive and usable user experience that also passes SpeedPage and WAVE tests, and that moves the site closer to WCAG 2 conformance. He'll also produce a site style guide. Have ideas? Reach out to Asmit.

Bioconda​

The Bioconda project has conducted a major rebuild of its packages, updating to the latest dependency pinnings of conda-forge. This entails using gcc 12 on linux and clang 15 on macOS, as well as using openssl 3. While most packages could be updated flawlessly, there are various remainders that are currently being skipped. Your help in fixing them would be greatly appreciated. Just choose a recipe from this list, check the provided build logs and create a PR with your solution to fix the failures. Sometimes, it could be as easy as updating to the latest upstream version.

Conda on the web​

Conda, now starring on YouTube​

Conda now has a YouTube channel with four playlists/videos to start you off: Packaging, Presentations, Training, and Releases.

Highlights from the Conda Community Forum​

And this thought provoking post from Ralf Gommers earlier this year:

Releases & announcements​