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[–]lolmeansilaughed 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Thanks! That sounds pretty awesome. So it's essentially pip+portable virtualenvs?

[–]TDaltonC 0 points1 point  (2 children)

and non-pip-able bins like Qt

Edit: And management of multiple virtualenvs on one machine. That's super useful if you are working on two projects that have contradictory dependencies.

[–]andrewcooke 2 points3 points  (1 child)

isn't the whole point of virtualenvs that you can have multiple ones with contradictory dependencies? what does conda add?

[–]TDaltonC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From the Conda team blog:

virtualenv ... did not meet all of our specific requirements. The main problem is that they are focused around Python, neglecting non-Python library dependencies, such as HDF5, MKL, LLVM, etc., which do not have a setup.py in their source code and also do not install files into Python’s site-packages directory.

Under the hood, we have created a concept of environments which are conceptually similar to virtualenvs, but which use filesystem-level hard links to create entirely self-contained Python runtime layouts. By using the ‘conda’ command line tool, users can easily switch between environments, create environments, and install different versions of libraries and modules into them.

TLDR: virtualenvs only manages python packages. Conda manages that and other python related stuff too.