"develop" mode?

[martindurant]

cc #342 (pip interop)

conda used to have a "develop" command that worked something like pip install -e: populate the metadata for the directory passed , but only link the files, don't copy them. The idea is, that the version of the package in the dev directory will appear installed, so a copy won't be pulled in by subsequent install/updates. Note that these would be python package directories with install.py, not conda install scripts.

If pip interop was working currently, this would not be required, as it would be enough to run the pip command above.

Any plans?

[wolfv]

Hi @martindurant thanks for opening an issue!

Yeah, I think having pip interop work would be great. I am still not sure what it would take to make it work. Generally, installing into a mamba-created environment with pip install -e . works fine, and I have been doing it a lot. The only problems arise when updating packages, as mamba won't recongize the pip installed packages.

I think for a develop mode it's easier to rely on the build tool (pip / setup.py in this case) as we don't have all the same information...

[wolfv]

It could also be interesting to make a modifiable package cache that shadows the general package cache, and make it possible to easily modify / debug files in that temporary package cache.

[hmaarrfk]

Would it be reasonable to request a "mark as installed" where we can mark a package as being installed, copying the metadata, but without actually copying the contents of the files?

mamba mark_as_installed numpy>=1.20

we would then be in charge of installing things (with pip install -e . -vv).

The advantage is that:

1. This would work for C dependencies (which i'm interested in )
2. This would be more compatible with packages that don't have the same names as their pypi counterparts.