Checklist

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

Summary

In a recent conda community call and in Anaconda internal discussions, we were reminded that conda-build has had less focus from the conda maintainer team than conda itself.

My guess is that a lack of in-depth experience with conda package building made maintenance more difficult than conda. Plus, many of the use cases and scenarios encoded in conda-build are outside the scope of regular software development and are easier to code review and engage with when being a package builder.

As such, to improve the maintenance of conda-build, we should focus on:

• Simplifying the maintenance and contributing process further
• Adding experienced packagers to the maintenance team
• Tapping into the existing knowledge in the community of using conda-build
• Having at least one person of conda maintainer team skilled up by being mentored in the packaging practitioners

Linked Issues & PRs

Short-term

• Mentor conda maintainers by packaging practitioners #4707
• Set up build tools team under the conda governance policy #4698
• Review testing strategy and implement improvements for better developer experience and test quality and coverage #4979
• Improve the PR template so contributors provide enough information to help the review team understand the context of the request #4980
• Review release policy of conda-build #4754
• Switch from SemVer to CalVer (i.e., adopt CEP-8) #4975
• Explore and prototype possible applications of a plugin system like conda #4978
• Mark conda-build skeleton as "Pending deprecation" #4640
• Replace conda_build/index.py with standalone conda-index #4645
• Write and vote on CEP to specify the next-gen recipe format #4755
• Add end user documentation for recipe format v2
• Add schema for recipe format v2
• Create a linter for recipe format v2
• Sync with efforts around using conda-build/boa for WASM for emerging platform needs

Mid-term

• Implement a plugin infrastructure like conda (CEP 4) and port an existing feature to a plugin #4932
• Get Anaconda build team to try out next-gen recipe format based on CEP (draft), to get experience and provide feedback to software team
• Support and interview conda-forge community while trialling next-gen recipe format, to learn about their experience
• Engage with boa maintainers to expand "build tools" team to also include boa and find common ground (e.g. port code improvements to conda-build, including code quality ;)

Long-term

• Write evolution plan for conda-build users and its recipe format(s), and how it relates to other community initiatives like boa
• Execute migration plan together with community and commercial users

Resources

• Support boa recipe format #1612
• The boa recipe spec — documentation
• Notes from boa spec discussion
• Commands and tools for building conda packages
• GitHub - mamba-org/boa: The fast conda package builder, based on mamba