Should we endorse Pixi?

[maresb]

While I have not yet had the chance to transition to Pixi in any of my projects, I'm convinced that this is the future of lockfiles in the Conda ecosystem. Moreover, they have a full-time team moving things forwards.

I think that conda-lock will still play a role with supporting a large number of existing projects since the effort of retooling can be hard to justify. But I'd hope that new projects would look primarily at Pixi.

Dually, I'd be very curious to hear from people who have tried both, which things does conda-lock do that are are not yet adequately supported by Pixi?

[synapticarbors]

I've just started experimenting with pixi and there are definitely a lot of things to like. The biggest issue that I've seen so far is just the difference in workflow/philosophy from conda. Pixi is directory-based, whereas conda/mamba has a global registry of environments. With conda I use the same environment for several projects, and will also do stuff like work in a scratch directory to fire up some jupyter-lab instance to do some quick analysis, or just open up a terminal, run mamba activate <env> and then work from there.

Pixi requires you to cd into a known location and run pixi shell or pixi run, or make use of the output of pixi shell-hook, which again has to live somewhere. So this isn't necessarily about features related to conda-lock, but is more a question about whether pixi itself is a full drop-in replacement for all conda workflows, and about adoption. There's been some discussion of pixi supporting a global registry of environments (prefix-dev/pixi#188), but this difference in workflows is an opinionated decision on the part of the pixi developers and isn't likely to change at least in the short term.

I think one thing to ask is if there is a world where you could use pixi to generate lock files and those lock files would be usable directly from conda/mamba to build environments. Then pixi could be used in place of conda-lock, without the requirement of adopting the full pixi workflow.

[maresb]

Thanks @synapticarbors for the feedback, it's really valuable, especially since I haven't found the time to investigate these details myself!

Regarding your question, someone asked something very similar here and received and answer.

In order to get the x-link, the answer directs here: prefix-dev/pixi#800