conda config --append injects the default value too (e.g. --append channels conda-forge results in channels: [conda-forge, defaults] #12356
Description
Checklist
- I added a descriptive title
- I searched open reports and couldn't find a duplicate
What happened?
This might be already reported but searching for
conda config default appenddidn't give me any good results, so sorry in advance!
The issue is that in a fresh configuration file, a user might expect that conda config --append channels conda-forge only implies having a .condarc file like:
channels:
- conda-forgeBut in reality is
channels:
- defaults
- conda-forgeNote how
defaultshas higher priority! We appended. Instead, the user is expected to know that they want to prepend instead. A bit unrealistic!
I get that the default value was always defaults, and now we are adding one more. However, conda config --set channels conda-forge is not supported because, confusingly, --set is only for "primitives" (aka scalars, aka anything that is not a list or dict), but channels expects a list. There's no obvious way to set the default channels to conda-forge (or anything else) in a single command. For an example, look at the required acrobatics to do so in the conda-forge based CI.
Things I've tried
Assuming I am on a fresh Miniconda install and I want to configure it to use for conda-forge, I need this:
$ conda config --append channels conda-forge
$ conda config --remove channels defaults # why do I need this!Instead I wish we could do something like this:
$ conda config --set channels conda-forge
# or if we get strict: conda config --set channels '[conda-forge]'But having the default value injected can be surprising and lead to errors like:
Conda Info
conda info
active environment : base
active env location : /Users/jrodriguez/.local/anaconda
shell level : 1
user config file : /Users/jrodriguez/.condarc
populated config files : /Users/jrodriguez/.local/anaconda/.condarc
/Users/jrodriguez/.condarc
conda version : 22.11.1
conda-build version : 3.23.3
python version : 3.9.15.final.0
virtual packages : __archspec=1=arm64
__osx=11.2.3=0
__unix=0=0
base environment : /Users/jrodriguez/.local/anaconda (writable)
conda av data dir : /Users/jrodriguez/.local/anaconda/etc/conda
conda av metadata url : None
channel URLs : https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/osx-arm64
https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/noarch
package cache : /Users/jrodriguez/.local/anaconda/pkgs
/Users/jrodriguez/.conda/pkgs
envs directories : /Users/jrodriguez/.local/anaconda/envs
/Users/jrodriguez/.conda/envs
platform : osx-arm64
user-agent : conda/22.11.1 requests/2.28.1 CPython/3.9.15 Darwin/20.3.0 OSX/11.2.3 solver/libmamba conda-libmamba-solver/22.8.1 libmambapy/1.1.0
UID:GID : 501:20
netrc file : None
offline mode : FalseConda Config
N/AConda list
N/AAdditional Context
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