What is Conda-Forge?
Conda-Forge is a community led collection of recipes, build infrastructure and distributions for the conda package manager.
There is an NSIDC channel on Anaconda.org that we used to publish to. We are shifting to maintain conda distributions through the conda-forge community, starting with earthaccess. It is prefferred to use the conda-forgechannel due to the checks and balances for maintaining that are standard through the automation and documentation provided for the community.
Becoming a maintainer
I was working on a project and wanted to use flask-dance. The current version is v7.0.0 whereas the conda-forge package had not been updated since v2.2.0, over 4 years prior.
I prefer to install flask-dance as a conda package, so I went over to the conda-forge flask-dance-feedstock repository on GitHub. I saw that there was not an active maintainer and someone tried to become one back in 2021 to update the repository and had received no response.
Becoming a maintainer was easy! Following the maintainer documentation, I opened an issue which led to the automatic ceation of a PR to add myself as a maintainer. Since it had been so long since there was an activate maintainer, I contacted conda-forge/core and admins and advised by the docs: @conda-forge/core please add me, the previous maintainer has not been active in years. @conda-forge-admin, please ping conda-forge/core
Updating a package
Once I received maintainer permissions I started the process of updating the flask-dance-feedstock to release the newest version.
First I needed to re-render the feedstock. conda-forge includes tens of thousands of projects, so it’s important that improvements are shared across all projects. This process is handled by bots which re-generate project files in response to certain events. To trigger a re-render I opened an issue with a specific title, which led to automatic creation of this pull request. I made a small mistake here by not bumping the build number since this was simply a re-render and NOT a new version. This resulted in a duplicate package being published. The rules for updating the build number are outlined in the docs. I followed these instructions and fixed my mistake with this pull request. You can now see the incorrect package marked as broken on anaconda.
Once the rerendering was complete I started on the process of updating the recipe for v7.0.0. I followed the instructions on the maintainer docs and forked the repository. This was quite simple and can be seen in this pull request. The automated checklists make the process very easy to follow. You will see that there is also rerendering as part of this process. Once I merged the pull request I soon saw the new package for v7.0.0 on anaconda.
Becoming a conda-forge maintainer makes releasing conda packages easy
I found it very easy to become a maintainer. The documentation is really straight forward and the community is supportive and responsive.
Citation
@online{marowitz2023,
author = {Marowitz, Robyn},
title = {Becoming a {Conda-Forge} Maintainer},
date = {2023-09-26},
langid = {en}
}