On 3 Dec 2013 08:17, "Marcus Smith" <qwcode@gmail.com> wrote:
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>>>  publication of curated stacks when the conda folks already have one,
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>> so, I see the index: http://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/index.html
>> Is they a way to contribute to this index yet?  or is that what would need to be worked out.
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> probably a dumb question, but would it be possible to convert all the anaconda packages to wheels? 
> even the non-python ones like:  qt-4.7.4-0.tar.bz2
> certainly not the intent of wheels, but just wondering if it could be made to work?
> but I'm guessing there's pieces in the core anaconda distribution itself, that makes it all work?
> the point here being to provide a way to use the effort of conda in any kind of "normal" python environment, as long you consistently point at an index that just contains the "conda" wheels.

I'm not sure about the conda -> wheel direction, but "pip install conda && conda init" mostly works already if you're in a virtualenv that owns its copy of Python (this is also the answer to "why not ActiveState or Enthought" - the Continuum Analytics software distribution stuff is truly open source, and able to be used completely independently of their services).

Their docs aren't that great in terms of explaining the *why* of conda - I'm definitely influenced by spending time talking about how it works with Travis and some of the other Continuum Analytics folks at PyCon US and the Austin Python user group.

However, their approach to distribution of fully curated stacks seems basically sound, the scientific and data analysis users I know that have tried it have loved it, the devs have expressed a willingness to work on improving their interoperability with the standard tools (and followed through on that at least once by creating the "conda init" command) , and they're actively interested in participating in the broader community (hence the presentation at the packaging mini-summit at PyCon US, as well as assorted presentations at SciPy and PyData conferences).

People are already confused about the differences between pip and conda and when they should use each, and unless we start working with the conda devs to cleanly define the different use cases, that's going to remain the case.

POSIX users need ready access to a prebuilt scientific stack just as much (or more) than Mac OS X and Windows users (there's a reason "ScientificLinux" is a distribution in its own right) and that space is moving fast enough that the Linux distros (even SL) end up being too slow to update. conda solves that problem, and it solves it in a way that works on Windows as well. On the wheel side of things we haven't even solved the POSIX platform tagging problem yet, and I don't believe we should make users wait until we have figured that out when there's an existing solution to that particular problem that already works.

Cheers,
Nick.

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