Why are packages installed rather than just linked to a specific environment?

Question

I've noticed that normally when packages are installed using various package managers (for python), they are installed in /home/user/anaconda3/envs/env_name/ on conda and in /home/user/anaconda3/envs/env_name/lib/python3.6/lib-packages/ using pip on conda.

But conda caches all the recently downloaded packages too.

So, my question is: Why doesn't conda install all the packages on a central location and then when installed in a specific environment create a link to the directory rather than installing it there?

I've noticed that environments grow quite big and that this method would probably be able to save a bit of space.

Answer 1

Conda already does this. However, because it leverages hardlinks, it is easy to overestimate the space really being used, especially if one only looks at the size of a single env at a time.

To illustrate the case, let's use du to inspect the real disk usage. First, if I count each environment directory individually, I get the uncorrected per env usage

$ for d in envs/*; do du -sh $d; done 2.4G    envs/pymc36 1.7G    envs/pymc3_27 1.4G    envs/r-keras 1.7G    envs/stan 1.2G    envs/velocyto 

which is what it might look like from a GUI.

Instead, if I let du count them together (i.e., correcting for the hardlinks), we get

$ du -sh envs/* 2.4G    envs/pymc36 326M    envs/pymc3_27 820M    envs/r-keras 927M    envs/stan 548M    envs/velocyto 

One can see that a significant amount of space is already being saved here.

Most of the hardlinks go back to the pkgs directory, so if we include that as well:

$ du -sh pkgs envs/* 8.2G    pkgs 400M    envs/pymc36 116M    envs/pymc3_27  92M    envs/r-keras  62M    envs/stan 162M    envs/velocyto 

one can see that outside of the shared packages, the envs are fairly light. If you're concerned about the size of my pkgs, note that I have never run conda clean on this system, so my pkgs directory is full of tarballs and superseded packages, plus some infrastructure I keep in base (e.g., Jupyter, Git, etc).