Dvc: conda: docs for conda extras and "missing" help messages

[jamesmyatt]

As far as I can tell, there's no documentation of the conda "power user" packages, as described in https://github.com/conda-forge/dvc-feedstock/blob/master/recipe/meta.yaml

Can this be added, please?

[pmrowla]

I think this is by design, the recommended way for installing via conda is to install the full dvc package which includes everything, like all of our other binary packages.

I'd consider "power user" in this case to be someone familiar enough with how conda/conda-forge works to investigate the extras sub-packages themselves.

[efiop]

@pmrowla We do document it for pip package, so it makes sense to do the same for conda.

[jamesmyatt]

@efiop , that's my thinking. I only discovered the sub-packages by installing everything and being shocked by the number of dependencies. I would have been much happier to see this mentioned in the docs.

In fact, it's a bit odd that on pip dvc is the minimum and dvc[all] is everything, while on conda dvc is everything and dvc-base is the minimum. I understand that was a choice and a consequence of the way conda and pip do extra dependencies, but when you're installing in a conda environment, you almost certainly only need one (at most) of the extra dependencies. I don't expect you to change this--it's probably too late--I just want to give my opinion.

[efiop]

@jamesmyatt Extras for conda package were introduced very recently, so we kinda had to preserve dvc as all-in-one to not break it for existing users. We could consider switching in an upcoming 2.0 release though. We'll need to adjust the instructions https://github.com/iterative/dvc/blob/1e1a0999f6b3cde830d9b8810009d0451bcc953d/dvc/tree/base.py#L110 to have the same thing for conda as we do for pypi and that should be it. But we should definitely start with docs.

[efiop]

Created https://github.com/conda-forge/dvc-feedstock/issues/168 for conda to make a switch in 2.0. Added checkbox https://github.com/iterative/dvc/issues/4841

[jamesmyatt]

Making a change for version 2.0 sounds like a sensible idea. Thanks.