conda-forge / conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io

Metapackage that loads build environment for a package

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Description

### Your question:

For a fortran package that is already in `conda-forge`, I want to provide an easy way to get all the environment required to build the package.

The rationale behind this goal is to quickly setup an environment that people can use to play with the code. Without `conda`, it is not straightforward to get all the compilers and libraries right.

With `conda` I can ask users to do something like:

```
conda install -c conda-forge compilers <...other build dependencies> <...run dependencies>
```

But I don't like this because the dependencies could change and then I have to keep track of the places where this line is written.

The other option that I found is to use the `outputs` key in `meta.yaml` to create a subpackage (`package-dev` or something like this) that contains the build dependencies of the real package as run dependencies.

Would this be the standard way of doing it? This seems like a very generic case so I wonder if there is a better solution for it. Would it make sense that `conda-forge` automatically created a `package-devenv` metapackage for all packages, or maybe to have some special key in `meta.yaml` like `publish-devenv` that would automatically create the metapackage.

Thanks!

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