Trial conda-store and gator, upstream potential contribution to docs

[consideRatio]

@saulshanabrook wrote on slack:

Hey all! Was just catching up with this, and I had been helping Quansight a bit on the conda store jupyterlab integration. They are currently working on adding support to Gator for conda store, and Isabella is working on a new proposed UX for gator.
Christopher Ostrouchov gave a nice demo of it the other day I recorded, let me see if we can post that somewhere publicly...

It builds both docker images, and conda environments, from environment.yml files

@fperez responded:

I couldn’t agree more - seamless environment management, sharing, integration with kernels, from the repo/directory to the UI to publishing, should be a critical design consideration for our hubs.

It’s a messy problem, with both high-level wants at the user level and lots of very finicky details underneath, so it’s not easy. But we should start converging on our preferred/offered approach -potentially based on existing tools we can adopt/contribute to- b/c this is really something where we need to have a good story for our users.

@erik Sundell I’m happy if we use our JMTE hub as a dogfooding playground for these tools - I already need better solutions on this and I’m happy to experiment a lot and see what works, provide feedback and potentially improve….

@consideRatio responded:

I'll learn about and try to deploy conda-forge and gator alongside our hub, and from the experience gained, try to go for some documentation improvements based on that at least!

I think it's quite important to understand a bit on how something works rather than just what it does in order to deploy something, and that type of documentation is often missing

[costrouc]

Hey @consideRatio happy to talk with you and anyone interested about conda-store over a call. Feel free to open any issues you run into and the docs are up to date at the moment. The architecture docs in contributing should give a good idea of how things work https://conda-store.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing.html#architecture. Easiest way to try it out is via https://conda-store.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#docker which given a whole jupyterhub/conda-store integration example.

[fperez]

@consideRatio - what's your take on this? It sounds like we should start testing these solutions (conda-store, gator, etc - I'm not up to speed on the details) so we can both develop a workflow and converge on our preferred approach, contributing upstream as needed...

[consideRatio]

@fperez thanks for the nudge - I absolutely think this should be setup and trialed, I'll find time to do it!

[consideRatio]

@yuvipanda has made relevant notes in https://hackmd.io/_hQdrilJQFCGExUqYgwY3Q?edit !