Packages included

[jakirkham]

Something worth discussing is what packages we should include. It probably goes without saying that we want the standard packages found in a Miniconda install. Though there has been discussion about this replacing the need for caching at staged-recipes ( conda-forge/staged-recipes#610 (comment) ) and feedstocks ( conda-forge/conda-smithy#176 (comment) ). As a result, we will need more things like conda-build-all for staged-recipes or conda-forge-build-setup used for CI configuration. Some of these may not make sense or be needed by the average user. So it is probably worth discussing whether they should be included the base installer and if not how we want to tier our installers (e.g. mini-anvil vs. ci-anvil).

[minrk]

Is the goal for this to be the base for conda-build CI, or more of a public entrypoint for conda? My main interest is to make bootstrapping a conda-forge setup dead-simple, without conda config --add.. for services and the like.

Given that, my inclination for 'mini-anvil' would be as bare as possible:

• Python
• conda
• pip

and associated dependencies.

For ci-anvil, is there a significant time benefit to packages being part of the base install vs the per-build bootstrap? I.e. is it any faster to fetch and install a ci-anvil with gcc vs installing gcc as part of the build dependencies? If there is a benefit (e.g. better use of caches), perhaps some stats on the common build dependencies would be appropriate. Otherwise, starting pretty bare probably makes the most sense:

• conda-build
• conda-build-all
• conda-forge-build-setup
• toolchain

etc.