msarahan

That is a downside of community maintenance, for sure. Conda-forge probably needs official policies and suggested workflows to have multiple varieties of recipes where feasible. There is never a one-size-fits-all solution when a community serves so many different people with so many different use cases. Spack fits the "my way and only my way" mentality better. Conda is more "close enough, and already ready for me to use."

the develop command in conda-build is indeed not really kept up. From https://github.com/conda/conda-build/issues/1992#issuecommen... :

Instead, I recommend creating whatever environment you want, activating it, and then running python setup.py develop or pip install -e . so that your package is installed in develop mode in that environment.