Installation with conda, different channels

I use (mini-) conda, therefore in agreement with the installation instruction I used

conda install bokeh

for installation.

Since I also need packages from conda-forge, following their recommendation I have the configuration

channels:
  - conda-forge
  - defaults
channel_priority: strict

which means I had the conda-forge bokeh package installed.

Since there has been a new version 2.4.0 released 2 days ago, I tried to update with conda update bokeh – to no effect, because that package is still at 2.3.3. Doing some research, I found that there are at least three different channels that package bokeh:

• main aka “defaults” (still at 2.3.3)
• conda-forge (still at 2.3.3)
• bokeh (at 2.4.0!)

Which one should I use?

‘bokeh’ is apparently the only one up-to-date. But the installation instructions don’t mention to use channel bokeh. And how does this channel integrate with conda-forge? Should I update my configuration to

channels:
  - bokeh
  - conda-forge
  - defaults
channel_priority: strict

?

@allefeld We (the Bokeh project) only directly publish to the bokeh channel, because that is the only place we have permissions to directly publish to. Conda-forge and Anadonda defaults will add it when they add it. Typically that’s within a few days, or a week, after a release But ultimately, we have no control over their process, priorities, or scheduling, beyond the issues we always file to notify them of our releases (you could go add you to I suppose)

It also looks like C-F auto-feedstock has picked up the change but that the recipe there will need some changes:

I guess the last thing I would say is that this typically only matters for a short period around release time. We could advocate that people use bokeh channel all the time, but speaking plainly, it’s better for funding and grant proposals for the conda install numbers to be as high as possible, and AFAIK, the individual bokeh channel installs don’t count towards that total. As a result: we mention the bokeh channel in release blogs (when it is immediately relevant) and not in the main docs. cc @timo

For reference, the “Installation details” page in the docs (Installation details — Bokeh 2.4.2 Documentation) does include information about installing from the Bokeh channel to get the most recent version of Bokeh.

@Bryan, thanks for the comprehensive answer!

@Timo, you’re right, I must have overlooked that.

If I decide to put the bokeh channel into my conda configuration, where should I put it? I’m assuming at the top, before conda-forge?

That seems reasonable but you will have to make sure to do your own acceptance testing. FWIW the only packages in the bokeh channel are Bokeh itself, and a couple of jupyter extensions:

https://anaconda.org/bokeh/repo

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