How to answer - Is conda appropriate for production?

[aquirdTurtle]

One point of friction I encountered at my workplace towards using pixi was the sense among some engineers that conda was not appropriate for production use. They had the sense that conda was mostly a shortcut that existed for academics and the like, and wanted to use uv and pypi packages directly. Of course pixi doesn't even use the conda cli, just the conda package format and package indexes.

I'm curious if anyone else has encountered such resistance, and/or if you have thoughts on the appropriate response to people who are skeptical that conda is appropriate for production.

[wolfv]

Hi @aquirdTurtle, there are misconceptions about Conda packages but I think we can definitely say that many (large!) companies are using Conda packages in production, from finance to engineering, robotics, HPC, AI, ...

At the core, Conda packages are just a flexible package format that was first invented to solve a particular Python pain point - shipping binary Python packages on Windows, macOS and Linux. Conda packages existed before wheels on PyPI, so it is kind of funny to think of wheels as more "mature". The initial use case was to package large parts of the scientific Python ecosystem as Conda packages (definitely where the most pain was, back in the days, as you needed GCC and FORTRAN compilers to get SciPy to run).

I think in terms of build system the conda-forge distribution is actually more mature, has a more consistent standard in terms of building packages, better static metadata than pure PyPI packages and can provide a consistent experience down to a lower level (as you can also install compilers, Rust, ... and many other low level tools and libraries). Conda packages de-vendor shared libraries that wheels often bundle (because they cannot express dependencies on pure-C libraries correctly).

All in all our goal is not really to "compete" with PyPI but rather with Debian in terms of packaging quality, and if you find any packaging issues in conda-forge I would love to hear it.