Hello all,
The last three weeks have seen a flurry of tool updates in the conda ecosystem, highlighting several things about conda. First, that there are a lot of tools in the ecosystem. It’s not just conda and mamba. There are many other things to help you navigate your package and environment needs. Second, the conda community is active.
Here is what’s happening:
conda-mirror release 0.9.0 
This conda-incubator project mirrors an upstream conda channel to a local directory. This release has 5 contributors and adds .conda support; migrated to GitHub workflow; improved download speed; plus 6 other updates.
conda-lock release 1.4.0 
This project is a lightweight library for generating fully reproducible lock files for conda environments. This release has 3 contributors, and added support for poetry dependency groups and several other features.
constructor releases 3.4.0 - 3.4.2 
This tool constructs an installer for a collection of conda packages. These releases had 15 contributors and several pages of enhancements and bug fixes, including platform-specific changes for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
conda release 23.1.0 
Conda is a cross-platform, language-agnostic binary package manager. This release has 12 contributors, and is the third release since we started bi-monthly releases last year. Recent releases have featured big speed improvements and the addition of plugin support to make conda extensible.
mamba and micromamba release 1.2 
mamba and micromamba are general software package managers for any kind of software and all operating systems. micromamba now has faster download speeds, better optimization of .conda format compression and decompression, and is closer to fully “reproducible” archives. See the full release blog post for more.
Grayskull releases 2.0.0 - 2.2.2 
Grayskull is an automatic conda recipe generator. These releases have 6 contributors and several new features, including CRAN support and the ability to generate R recipes, and initial support for pyproject.toml files and for Poetry.
conda-libmamba-solver release 23.1.0 
conda-libmamba-solver is a conda plugin that incorporates mamba’s lightening fast solver into conda. This is the 5th release of this plugin and it features bug fixes, documentation improvements, and CI improvements.
This announcement is a precursor to what will (hopefully) become a periodic newsletter covering what’s happening in the conda community. Look for more in the coming months.
2023 is off to a great start!
Dave C on behalf of the conda community