Maintaining the CIs is difficult

As of now, our CI runs on top of a rolling release distribution (conda-forge) which makes maintaining the CI and CI envs very difficult. Can we go back to testing our packages against an Ubuntu version? This way when we want to add a package, we don't need to update the whole CI packages.

What do you think?

The solution for this was, IMO, docker-based builds. Unfortunately, that seems stuck.

Furthermore, how do you intend to keep conda-forge compatibility if things are not updated?

How do you imagine our docker-based CI would work?

The same as we can achieve today by creating "environments under certification", except we would be able to create docker containers for these environments.

In the registry, image names would match our current environment names for conda.

This allows a lot of flexibility, including testing whole OS based distributions.

mentioned in commit 8df2a529

Can we have OSX in a VM for our CI running on our mac? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/blob/master/docs/executors/virtualbox.md This would make it just like our docker approach here. Also, I will need this for bob.conda probably to properly build packages for mac too.

It is possible - what I not sure is if that is desirable from a maintenance perspective. We have to discuss it in details so I understand the full picture of your vision.

closed

We're now rolling over the conda defaults channel, which is supposed to be much more stable.