How to request for conda to support Julia install for Windows OS?

Hi,

I noticed that we can use Anaconda to install Julia, but unfortunately it appears to be available only for Linux and Mac (OSX).

How do we request for a Windows version to be made available? Or if it is straightforward, how to go about doing it?

Sorry if this has already been asked, I searched but the topics I found didn’t address this. :frowning:

Regards,
Keng Onn

1 Like

The Anaconda packages of Julia seem to be quite out-of-date (conda-forge has version 1.1.11), and I wouldn’t really recommend installing Julia this way on any platform. Just use the point-and-click Julia installer for Windows.

Realize that Julia has its own package manager, so you only need an external package manager like Anaconda to install Python packages (if you want to call Python from Julia), and even then you can let Julia manage Anaconda for you automatically.

(Unfortunately, Anaconda transitioned in 2020 to becoming free only for non-commercial use, so its future as a popular Python distribution seems uncertain.)

6 Likes

I’ve been looking at what it might take to improve the conda-forge issue. The problem is that the conda-forge maintainers tried to integrate Julia with other existing libraries in conda-forge, but some of Julia’s dependencies are heavily patched.

If we’re not going to integrate Julia with other libraries in conda-forge, there might be little point in having conda-forge just do a vanilla build. The main utility would be allowing Julia to be installed via conda-forge.

2 Likes

Thanks for your helpful replies! And apologies for my late response > <.

Reason why I’m asking is because I’m trying to use Julia within an enterprise environment (with firewall, proxies etc) and I can’t use point-and-click installers as I don’t have admin rights.

The folks here have already set up an Anaconda-Artifactory process whereby people could get Python set up (via Anaconda) and use “conda install ” for whichever Python packages they want. I was hoping to do the same for Julia as well, i.e. install Julia via Anaconda so that I can try it out.

My goal is to try out Julia on Jupyter notebooks :slight_smile: . Any pointers or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Enterprise environments with arbitrary restrictions is a good argument…

Note that, in addition to the Julia installation, you also need access to the Julia registry and Github so that you can install packages with the Julia built-in Pkg manager.

Would Docker be an alternative for you?
There are ready-to-use images for Jupyter+Julia and for Pluto.jl (Julia alternative to Jupyter) available.

2 Likes

Great point! I haven’t considered Docker at all. Apparently my company does allow Docker, I’ll give this a shot and see how this goes :), thanks again!

1 Like

Some suggestions:

https://hub.docker.com/r/jupyter/datascience-notebook

https://hub.docker.com/r/plutojl/pluto

Since I last posted, Julia is now updated to 1.7.1 on conda-forge for Linux and macOS.

After we complete some clean up, a conda-forge Windows build is next on my todo list there.

After rereading the post, I do wonder why the op does not use the portable download which is just a zip file for Windows. It does not require admin privileges.

The Julia build via conda-forge is not officially supported. I am currently the maintainer of the Julia feedstock for conda-forge. If there are any issues with the conda-forge install of Julia, please post an issue here:

https://github.com/conda-forge/julia-feedstock

4 Likes