> Some notes: values 4 Innovative Connectionism

[FleetHub1988]

Some notes:

• conda is a general purpose package manager not limited to Python

• [...]

• There is (currently) no standard for placing the environment.yaml. The file format really just describes an arbitrary selection of packages one might have in a conda "virtual environment".

• A more specific file would be recipe/meta.yaml, which contains be the package build instructions (different format), including dependencies split into build, host and run (where build vs host separates the build system from development libraries in the case of cross compilation).

Here we might need to differentiate between conda packages that are meant to be installed and work material that is meant to be handed out for some event or as supplementary material for a publication. When I prepare seminar notebooks, I do hand out an environment.yml for a quick setup but I would never craft a recipe/meta.yaml. When we look at the repositories that are part of literature (such as introduction to ML etc.), we also rarely see this. In my opinion, these recipes are reserved for standalone packages that other people might import (such as a Python module) or use from the CLI (actually any kind of software). Now, should these people be forced to use recipes anyway?

Originally posted by @1kastner in dependabot/dependabot-core#2227 (comment)