Start article about the history of conda-forge

[jaimergp]

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Still work in progress, but I wanted to capture the momentum started by Wolf and Filipe's podcast episode.

Tagging some folks for awareness, visibility, and hopefully a review, comments or even contributions if they are feeling generous 🙏 @ocefpaf @jakirkham @pelson @dholth @bryevdv @msarahan @asmeurer @ilanschnell. Feel free to tag others as well if you feel they can add more context into the early days!

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[ocefpaf]

Great article @jaimergp! It felt like it ended with cliffhanger and make me want for more. Are you planning on part 2/∞?

[jaimergp]

Are you planning on part 2/∞?

Yes! This is just the beginning, and not ready for publication yet. Was hoping to gather some interest here and get comments from the "old guard" while I cover the very beginnings. Then I'll need a looot of help with the 2016-2021 period, and after that I think I can recollect a few things.

Even basic bullet items with a rough chronology would help so I can research git histories, archive.org, etc.

[beckermr]

Here are some big events to track / mention. I don't have all of the details:

• bot creation
• great compiler migration
• adding of special ecosystems (cuda, pypi, etc)
• growth in terms of packages, downloads, etc.
• rise of non-anaconda tooling (mamba, boa, rattler)
• addition of major supporters (azure for ci, gpu ci, etc)

[isuruf]

There were several bots

• Linting bot - conda-forge-webservices
• First bot that sent pinning updates - I don't remember where it was, but can figure it out.
• Commenting bot (conda-forge-admin, rerender). Also conda-forge-webservices
• regro bot that superseded the first bot that sent pinning updates. - regro/cf-scripts

Some other things to note

• Packaging of compiler runtimes to become defaults independent
• Cross compilation
• Overwhelm of CI where CI took a couple of days.
• azure and its donation