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Conda 4.14.0 and conda-build 3.22.0 releases

· 3 min read

We are pleased to announce that new releases of conda and conda-build are now available in the conda defaults channel. The updates can be installed with

conda update conda conda-build

Here are some highlights from the releases:

conda rename

Have you changed your mind about the name of a conda environment? No problem. You can now rename a conda environment with the conda rename command. conda rename supports renaming your current environment, or any of your existing environments.

conda rename -n old_env_name new_env_name

See this pull request for additional command options.This implements a feature request that was first submitted in 2016 (and we think that is a record).

Channel notices

Channel owners can now create notifications for their channel users. Notifications can be tagged as informational, warnings, or critical and each type is displayed differently. How often messages appear is controlled by the channel managers. Channel users can also see all notices for all current channels by entering

conda notices

See CEP-6: Add Channel Notices to conda for full details.

Error Handling

There are a few improvements to conda's error handling:

  1. SSLErrors are now returned to the user as SSLErrors, instead of HTTPErrors.
  2. Invalid package name errors now include the invalid package name that caused the error.
  3. You will never see this amusing error message again 😊:
    % conda help

    CommandNotFoundError: No command 'conda help'.
    Did you mean 'conda help'?

Inclusive Naming and Terminology

Conda has embarked on an inclusive naming initiative to replace potentially offensive naming when we come across it. This release includes two types of fixes in conda and conda-build.

  1. Whitelist/Blacklist are now Allowlist/Denylist
  2. The former master branch is now the main branch.

Enhanced Project metadata support in conda-build

conda-build is now compliant with the PEP 517 and 518 standards for loading project metadata. Metadata can now be specified in JSON, TOML, and YAML (and can be easily extended to support other formats).

Other improvements

There are many other improvements in these releases. Here are a few:

  1. Better handling of CUDA packages on Windows
  2. Improved support for conda on FIPS-enabled systems
  3. Improved support for Python 3.10 and the .conda format in conda-build
  4. A new section in the conda developer guide on writing tests, and a deep dive into writing integration tests in particular
  5. Many other big fixes, code cleanups, and documentation improvements. See the conda and conda-build release notes for a complete list.

Contributors!

These were banner releases for new contributors to both projects.