Checklist

• I added a descriptive title
• I searched open requests and couldn't find a duplicate

What is the idea?

There are several use cases that are desirable to be customizable that could be tackled by implementing a "repo interaction" plugin. Some examples are, authentication, replacing/modifying the transport layer, or even interfacing with custom repo implementations.

The idea behind this is that conda would provide a plugin that allows to completely replace the code where it interacts with the remote repository.

This has some challenges, as the current codebase is not in the best shape to implement this. And there are several parts of the code that interact with the repo and need hooking into.

Additionally, ideally, it would be good to also provide the original implementation as a plugin, so that people can re-use parts of it if they just need minor modifications.