2020-05-27 conda-forge core meeting

Attendees

Agenda

Your agenda items

  • [x] (all) intros for new people on the line?

    • Marcelo!

  • [x] (CJ) standing budget item

  • [ ] (CJ) institutional partners metadata (https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/pull/1028)

  • [ ] (ED) Should we just merge in the cfep PRs with the status of “deferred” since there’s zero action on any of them?

  • [x] (MRB) change how we mark packages as broken

    • currently we move packages to broken and remove them from main

      • this means users cannot recreate old envs where a package was marked as broken

    • new system would leave packages on main (only add broken label) and then remove them via the removals section of the repo data patches

      • this is how defaults does it

    • do we need to announce this before switching? should we switch?

    • side effects are that this procedure leaves the repodata in weird states

      • the only source of truth is the one on the CDN (any other source is wrong)

      • packages can have different looking requirements between broken and main labels even on the CDN

    • matching defaults is probably more important than the things above

    • TODO:

      • [ ] document how users are supposed to interpret broken label

      • [ ] update how we, as core, are supposed to mark packages as broken

      • [ ] (ED) document strategies for reproducible environments using conda-forge

  • [x] (CJ) I’d like to form a finance subteam, if you are interested in serving please let me know.

    • numfocus point of contact

    • responsible for letting core know where we stand financially

    • pending financial matters

    • acting as final approvers

  • [x] (JJH) Should tk require freetype and X11? https://github.com/conda-forge/tk-feedstock/pull/40

    • Fonts will look nicer in TK applications

    • Introduces new requirements (and download/disk space) to Python

      • fontconfig: 300kb, freetype: 1mb

      • some additional packages needed as well

    • Recommendation is to create two variants, with and without “nice fonts”

  • [x] (IF) Making a linux-anvil-ppc64le package and distributing cudatoolkit in the docker image

    • https://github.com/conda-forge/docker-images/pull/113

    • There’s no defaults::cudatoolkit for ppc64le, but the docker image is still useful to have

    • Even though we can’t redistribute defaults::cudatoolkit we are doing it via docker as we are caching it.

    • Notes:

      • Make it clear to users that this docker image doesn’t have cudatoolkit and why it doesn’t have cudatoolkit.

  • [x] (WV) “standardization” of a next gen package format and other parts of the conda ecosystem

    • Make available specs public? E.g: https://anaconda.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AD/pages/90210540/Conda+package+format+v2

    • Some notes regarding a next version of the package spec are written down here: https://hackmd.io/axI1tQdwQB2pTJKt5XdY5w

      • this current spec doesn’t support everything one needs for the current stack

    • also some discussion on gitter and at bot subteam meeting a few months ago

      • using python as the language came up more than once

        • objections are that it is not static metadata and might be too hard to parse

      • deprecate selectors in favor of …

        • jinja2 if statements (hard to parse)

        • letting any value in the config be a dict with the selector info in the key

          • this follows what rust does in their TOML

          • very easy to parse

          • always results in valid YAML

      • deprecate the use of some jinja2 elements (any control flow elements) since they are hard to parse

    • related to the conda working group that Kale is organizing

    • Interest

      • Jonathan Helmus

      • Wolf

      • Marcel

      • Scopatz

        • specifically interested in the activation scripts

      • Cheng?

      • Matt B.

      • Marcelo

      • Mike S.

      • John

  • [x] (UK) static libraries in conda-forge

    • Our toolstack and systems are tailored for dynamic linkage, thus we want to focus on that in conda-forge

    • Users are interested in static libraries for some use cases, e.g.

      • Building wheels for PyPI on Windows

      • (MRB) Do we want to make a better effort to support this? Marking static packages and doing small migrations when we move compilers as needed? Our answer has been no. (UK: Note that the reported breakages were because of LTO- enabled static libraries, that’s a next level)

      • static libraries can have compatibility concerns with compilers and ld/binutils

    • Go and Rust are separate discussions (packaging and licensing, etc.)

    • What do we do about accidental leakage?

      • remove them or mandate a split package

    • [ ] Add linting hints to builds to find them

    • [ ] Recommend how to package them

    • [ ] We should write docs saying we don’t provide support and this is a bad idea.

Active votes

Subteam updates

Bot

Stuff from last week that we didnt get to

ARM

POWER

CUDA

Docs

staged-recipes

website

security+systems

  • (ED) Any other updates on this one? Need any help?

    • (MRB) CFEP-13 is done.

      • Isuru suggested using the github api and that worked. Thanks!

      • All feedstocks converted over and staged-recipes is making new feedstocks with the right keys/tokens.

      • To move forward, we simply have to deactivate the binstar token and put a new one on heroku.

      • I will make an announcement and give people a few weeks.

      • We probably want to solve the rerendering issues with github first.

  • (MRB) next up is better user management

CI infrastructure

Compiler upgrade

CFEP updates

Open PRs

  • cfep-04 X11 and CDT policy

    • INACTIVE - Merge in with some inactive-esque status?

    • Needs new champion. Thanks for your work on this pkgw! Has unaddressed comments from pkgw as from Jan 10, 2020

  • cfep-06 Staged-recipes review lifecycle

    • INACTIVE - Merge in with some inactive-esque status?

    • Lingering comment from @saraedum. @jakirkham, can you reply? Has unadressed comment from @saraedum from Jan 8, 2020

    • (MRB) The stalebot has solved the worst of the issues here. I think we could defer this one permanently.

  • cfep-10 Feedstock statuses, unmaintained

    • INACTIVE - Merge in with some inactive-esque status?

    • Needs another review. Has unaddressed updates from pkgw as of Jan 11, 2020

  • cfep-12 Removing packages that violate the terms of the source package

    • Active debate about moving to “broken” vs deleting from conda-forge channel

    • Active vote, ends on 2020-03-11

    • What were the results of the vote?

    • Did we hear back from NumFOCUS?

Discussion

Check in on previous action items

Copy previous action items from last meeting agenda.

Last meeting

  • [ ] (ED) Who we are page? Some combination of a FAQ and a who is everyone. FAQ things like:

    • who’s the POC for CF <> Anaconda, CF <> NumFocus, CF <> Azure

    • who’s the POC for the various subteams?

    • Informal information: roles, day jobs, bios, the whole nine yards, why you’re here, etc.

    • Public or internal? I don’t really care either way. Anyone feel strongly one way or the other?

    • opt-in to public bios

    • software carpentry has a large number of instructors and has https://carpentries.org/instructors

    • some concern about “yet another place to keep stuff up to date”

3 meetings ago

  • [ ] (Kale) schedule conda working group

  • [ ] (CJ) Institutional Partners page in docs

    • [ ] TODO: Submit skeleton for PR into conda-forge.github.io repo

Move to Issue Tracker

  • [ ] cfep-10 next steps: CJ to call a vote for feedback

  • [ ] cfep-06 next steps: Ask staged recipes team to champion this CFEP and move it forward

  • [ ] jakirkham & CJ-wright to sync on adding CUDA to the migration bot

  • [ ] (Eric) Scheduling Anaconda <-> conda-forge sync on anaconda.org requirements gathering

    • Will try and get this scheduled in the next month.

  • [ ] (Anthony) Reach out to NumFocus to figure out legal ramifications of not including licenses in files.

  • [ ] (Eric) check internally for funding levels for hotels & flying folks from the community in?

  • [ ] (Eric) Figure out finances of conda-forge to support themselves?

  • [ ] (jjhelmus) Open up CFEP for which python’s we’re going to support

  • [x] Remove conda forge readthedocs.

    • done already

  • [ ] (jakirkham) write a blog post on CUDA stuff we discussed today

  • [ ] (jakirkham) update docs on how to add CUDA support to feedstocks

  • [ ] (jakirkham) will open an issue on conda-smithy to investigate Drone issues. (ping the aarch team)

    • https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/954