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by dijksterhuis·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Read your post. Yeah, conda works fine with pip stuff. And yes, what you've detailed is similar to pinning versions in requirements. Which I do as standard -- I even do it with apt installs sometimes.

But I often need to install via system package management for other dependencies. conda doesn't respect the base system package manager. That is what causes headaches.

If conda respected system package management first, then installed as necessary, I wouldn't have a problem with it as an admin. But it doesn't because it's not built for engineering/admins (want stability + efficiency), it's built for scientific projects (want to run code easily).

Also, I'm using the "royal* we. Like, we as in admins generally. I'm the only admin in my team (voluntarily), so I need to be ruthless with this type of stuff.

EDIT:

I think you missed my point about virtual environments.

The entire container is a virtual environment. Why would we want to use another virtual environement for no reason except the fact that conda wants us to?

It adds extra steps which we'd have maintain. Which means more developer resource spent on maintenance. Which means less time spent on new features.

It's just another thing that could go wrong. Simpler systems break less often.

1 comments
I see where you're coming from.

My use case is this: as a data scientist, I start new code bases all the time. Each project, simple experiment, data analysis, etc. needs its own cleanly separated dependency environment so I don't end up in dependency hell (I have 12 conda environments on my machine right now). Conda allows me to handle these environments with ease (one tool and a handful of commands -> as detailed in the article). With conda, I also have my data science Python cleanly separated from my system Python.

Of course there are other tools that can handle this use case. But pip alone won't do the trick. I don't like to have three separate tools for this (pip + venv + pyenv).

When I put something into production, I naturally want to keep using my conda environment.yml and have the same environment in dev and prod instead of switching to pip + requirements.txt, which might introduce inconsistencies.