conda-forge, (lib)mamba & libsolv: universal and reusable parts
11-10, 17:50–18:10 (UTC), Room 2

This talk introduces conda-forge (a community led collection of recipes for Windows, macOS and Linux), the mamba package manager which works cross-platform and independent of any language and the parts that make it up (libsolv and librepo). Furthermore, we will demonstrate how libmamba can be used to create bindings to mamba or specialized package managers, for example for plugin management in applications.


conda-forge is a community led collection of build-recipes for all major operating systems (Windows, macOS and Linux). It's a hybrid in a space between a classic "Linux"-distribution and PyPI/NPM style DIY distribution. It moves fast and packages a lot of bleeding edge scientific software. conda-forge is fully controlled by repositories on GitHub with humans and bots sharing the work of keeping packages up to date.

Mamba is a package manager that works natively with conda packages. It is written in C++ and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It also comes with a library (libmamba) and Python bindings (libmambapy) that can be utilized by other applications to manage software or software plugins.

Furthermore, recently a new library (currently dubbed powerloader) has been developed that can down- and upload from package repositories. It supports parallel downloads, mirrors and automatic mirror selection as well as OCI registries and S3 storage. It is modeled after librepo but implemented in a more cross-platform compatible way.

This talk will introduce all these tools and show opportunities how they can be re-used for other applications.

Wolf Vollprecht is a Technical Director at QuantStack. QuantStack is a small open source software consulting company that mostly works on scientific open source software.
Wolf spends most of his time working on the mamba package manager, and as part of the conda-forge core team. Mamba is a fast, cross-platform and language agnostic package manager that works with conda packages.

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