Start article about the history of conda-forge

[jaimergp]

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Still work in progress, but I wanted to capture the momentum started by Wolf and Filipe's podcast episode.

Tagging some folks for awareness, visibility, and hopefully a review, comments or even contributions if they are feeling generous 🙏 @ocefpaf @jakirkham @pelson @dholth @bryevdv @msarahan @asmeurer @ilanschnell. Feel free to tag others as well if you feel they can add more context into the early days!

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[ocefpaf]

Great article @jaimergp! It felt like it ended with cliffhanger and make me want for more. Are you planning on part 2/∞?

[jaimergp]

Are you planning on part 2/∞?

Yes! This is just the beginning, and not ready for publication yet. Was hoping to gather some interest here and get comments from the "old guard" while I cover the very beginnings. Then I'll need a looot of help with the 2016-2021 period, and after that I think I can recollect a few things.

Even basic bullet items with a rough chronology would help so I can research git histories, archive.org, etc.

[beckermr]

Here are some big events to track / mention. I don't have all of the details:

• bot creation
• great compiler migration
• adding of special ecosystems (cuda, pypi, etc)
• growth in terms of packages, downloads, etc.
• rise of non-anaconda tooling (mamba, boa, rattler)
• addition of major supporters (azure for ci, gpu ci, etc)

[isuruf]

There were several bots

• Linting bot - conda-forge-webservices
• First bot that sent pinning updates - I don't remember where it was, but can figure it out.
• Commenting bot (conda-forge-admin, rerender). Also conda-forge-webservices
• regro bot that superseded the first bot that sent pinning updates. - regro/cf-scripts

Some other things to note

• Packaging of compiler runtimes to become defaults independent
• Cross compilation
• Overwhelm of CI where CI took a couple of days.
• azure and its donation

[moorepants]

I remember being in a birds of a feather session at SciPy around 2013 or 2014 where the momentum to make conda forge real seemed to solidify and it was very soon after that conference that it took material form.

[asmeurer]

The content is accurate as far as I can remember (which doesn't necessarily mean much). I would suggest doing a full checkup for grammar, and in particular, being consistent across the post with tense.

[ocefpaf]

I remember being in a birds of a feather session at SciPy around 2013 or 2014 where the momentum to make conda forge real seemed to solidify and it was very soon after that conference that it took material form.

It was 2015 that the BoF happened and the soft launch on 2016 if I'm not mistaken.

[hmaarrfk]

I would like it if there were a paragraph that mentions the deep collaborative period between Anaconda's default channel and conda-forge. Where we would often trade recipes collaboration was intricately linked.

I really look back fondly at the times where I was learning alot from msarahan, mingwandroid, jcrist, mrocklin (not sure if he worked for Anaconda at the time).

For me, the availability of Qt, Pillow, and OpenCV on windows/osx/linux were what brought me to Anaconda/conda/conda-forge.

[jjhelmus]

My recollection might be off but I recall a meeting at SciPy 2015 which included @pelson, @ocefpaf, @scopatz, myself and likely others where some initial details of what became conda-forge were discussed.

This timeline aligns with the first commit in conda-forge/staged-recipe from the Fall of 2015 and the history recorded in the talks documentation page

I recall conda-forge being a highlight of SciPy 2016 where Phillip Elson gave a talk on the project. I was involved in the project so my view of the excitement in the conference is biased :smile:.

[jjhelmus]

Another possible highlight to include in the history is SciPy 2013 when Travis Oliphant announced binstar.org which became anaconda.org during the Thusday lightning talks

[msarahan]

Added some Continuum/Anaconda context https://github.com/jaimergp/conda-forge.github.io/pull/1

[jaimergp]

Thank you so much @msarahan, that adds so much context!

[msarahan]

This is a really wonderful collaboration and trip down memory lane! I have one more PR with line breaks and a couple of other links at https://github.com/jaimergp/conda-forge.github.io/pull/2