What does conda do when "solving environment"

python anaconda updates conda package-managers
dkv picture dkv · Aug 8, 2018 · Viewed 51.1k times · Source

Whenever I run conda install/remove/update <package>, it tells me it's "Solving environment" for some time before telling me the list of things it's going to download/install/update. Presumably it's looking for dependencies for <package>, but why does it sometimes remove packages after doing this operation? For example, as I was trying to install Mayavi, it decided it needed to remove Anaconda Navigator.

Furthermore it does not provide an option to perform only a subset of the suggested operations. Is there a way to specify that I don't want a package removed?

Answer

zhaofeng-shu33 picture zhaofeng-shu33 · Nov 4, 2018

You can add --debug option to the conda command and see the output from console(or terminal). For example, type conda update --debug numpy. From the output, we can see that the client requests repodata.json from channel list and do some computation locally in the Solving Environment Step.

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