Conda: Add "track_features" and "app_own_environment" to repodata.json output(s)

[e.rotteveel_1850]

First of all; we've been using ProGet for our more-and-more internal package distribution for more than a year now, and pretty happy about it!

I recently tried to add some more metadata to a package, but two items are not taken over by ProGet: "track_features" and "app_own_environment". The first is simply a string, the second is a boolean. Both are available in a conda package's "index.json" file.

Can these be added? Thanks!

[atripp]

Hi @e-rotteveel_1850,

Glad to hear it!

Our only exposure to the Conda ecosystem is writing a feed for it, so hope you don't mind a few "dumb" questions :)

Are there any official/public packages (from like the anaconda repository) that have this field? I presume those would also be in their index.

Any idea where these might be officially documented? I found a reference in the meta.yaml specs, but you said "json" and that's clearly "yaml". I figure maybe it turns into a json at some point.

Are there any similar fields? I see we parse a bunch of fields, like constrains to dev_url.

Cheers,
Alana

[e.rotteveel_1850]

A good example for "track_features" is this package: https://anaconda.org/main/_low_priority, which directly explains the idea of "track_features": packages that "activate" features (either because they have "track_features" specified themselves or because their dependencies do so) will get a lower priority. The attribute is useful when you have a GPU build and a CPU build of the same package, and you want to prioritize one over the other.

In our case, we wish to do exactly that: use track_features to prioritize a CPU version of a certain package over a GPU version because the former runs on any PC, while the latter only works with a proper GPU available.

Some additional reading material is here: https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/stable/user-guide/concepts/packages.html#track-features

In any case, the "track_features" attribute can be found in the index.json file that is in a conda package.

About the meta.yaml: that is a specification/configuration when building a package. The build process then generates the index.json file (and the about.json) and puts it in the package (under the info folder) for repositories to extract useful information from. I think that for ProGet, the index.json is more important than the about.json.

Finally, this method gives a quite complete overview of all keys that may be in the index.json. They are not all neccessarily there, though. Here is the method/code:
https://github.com/conda/conda-build/blob/8df6493565dae517165754bd75d7d74de1522dc3/conda_build/metadata.py#L1803

Hope this helps!

[atripp]

Thanks @e-rotteveel_1850 !

This is super-helpful indeed, especially the package that has that metadata.

Do you have an example package that is emitting app_own_environment in the index repo? It looked like it was handled slightly differently in the conda-build code you found, and might be a nested property.. or something. It also seems to be a bool.

It isn't trivial to add fields but also not terribly complicated. I added an item PG-2876 that we hope to get in the Feb 7 maintenance release, but might get pushed back.

Let us know if you're aware of a app_own_environment package as well, that really helps to test this. We likely will not use conda, but simply verify json/index data.

[e.rotteveel_1850]

Thanks for putting this on the issue tracker!

As for "app_own_environment": I only found it in the sourcecode of Anaconda Navigator - a GUI package manager for conda environments. It seems a useful feature but I cannot find any other package that uses it.

So if you cannot add "app_own_environment" without having extra info, you can just leave it out. It was just a nice-to-have.

Looking forward to a new version with "track_features" added to the index output!

[gdivis]

We've added both of these properties to the index - you should see them in this week's release of 2024.26 on Friday. Thanks for the feature request!