conda and binstar: initial experiences

A while ago my friend teh recommended that I use conda for Python package management, because of its intrinsic superiority to pip & virtualenv. I’m no fan of either, and teh generally has pretty good taste, so I thought I’d check it out.

I haven’t formed an overall opinion yet, but I can say without reservation that the overall experience for someone who has become used to pip & virtualenv is very frustrating.

What I found myself wanting was a one pager explaining conda & binstar to someone familiar with pip & virtualenv, which are unquestionably vastly more popular. Alas, there’s none to be found.

There are some guidelines here and there on the net about how to install a package that’s available on PyPI into a conda system, but they don’t always work.

For example, I’d like to play around with pyrsistent. The recommended approach is to do the following:

:::console
$ conda skeleton pypi pyrsistent
$ conda build pyrsistent
$ binstar upload //anaconda/conda-bld/osx-64/pyrsistent-0.3.1-py27_0.tar.bz2
$ conda install pyrsistent

Everything works fine up until the build step, but the upload fails because someone has already uploaded the package. Fine. So conda install pyrsistent should work, right?

:::console
$ conda install pyrsistent
Fetching package metadata: ...
Error: No packages found matching: pyrsistent

Wut.

Searching binstar finds pyristent. Apparently I have to add some kind of channel (a concept that’s not well explained, and that does not seem to appear at all on the binstar UI).

I try this way:

:::console
$ conda config --add channels https://binstar.org/auto

But apparently that’s not a channel:

:::console
$ conda install pyrsistent
Fetching package metadata: ....Error: HTTPError: 404 Client Error: NOT FOUND: https://binstar.org/auto/osx-64/

So I try this way:

:::console
$ conda config --add channels https://binstar.org/auto

And that is a channel, but pyrsistent it doth not find:

:::console
$ conda install pyrsistent
Error: No packages found matching: pyrsistent

I take a look at the files page for pyrsistent and it looks like the only file is linux-64/pyrsistent-0.1.0-py27_0.tar.bz2. I’m running OS X (for my sins) and my guess is that the “No packages found matching” error refers to a lack of binary builds.

So, what am I supposed to do? At this point, the documentation and the error messages from the tools leave me with no obvious way forward. Perhaps there’s some underlying concept that would illuminate all for me, if only I could grasp it. Perhaps it’s simply a bug.

In any case, I’m not abandoning conda yet (in part because I have no idea how to extricate it from my system), but it has some way to go before it is properly better than pip & virtualenv.