RFC: Explain conda-forge's mission

[jjerphan]

Where should the content be added?

In a dedicated "Mission" page or "About us" page?

What should be added?

Hello,

conda-forge is a wonderful software distribution.

Yet, there are is section in the documentation (AFAIK) mentioning conda-forge's mission / philosophy / benefits. The "What is conda-forge?" section mentions that:

conda-forge is a community effort and a GitHub organization which contains repositories of conda recipes and thus provides conda packages for a wide range of software. The built distributions are uploaded to anaconda.org/conda-forge and can be installed with conda.

but the model and the benefits of the projects aren't explained (and I am not sure that conda packages and their relevance might not be understood properly by newcomers).

I think making it explicit would help users understand the project better.

I started consolidating some notes here, in this regards.

What do you think?

Additional information

Originally mentioned by @matthewfeickert see this thread.

Also discussed privately with @h-vetinari who mentioned opening a RFC or issue here to continue discussions.

[travishathaway]

Hi @jjerphan,

I really enjoyed reading your notes so far on this. One thing I'm curious about is whether this would be added to the index page of the docs you linked too? If so, I would advise against such a page being the very first thing that appears in the documentation section. I think this would be a much better addition as single, "What is conda-forge?" page.

Regarding the notes themselves, I have two pieces of feedback:

1. I would only mention "Scientific" software when talk about conda and conda-forge historically. Conda-forge can be used to develop an array of software outside of scientific purposes and we should use language that reflects that.
2. I would mention more about the editorial process of recipe submission and how this differs from things like PyPI and NPM.

Another thing to keep in mind for historical purposes was that conda-forge, IIRC, was created because a group of people felt that Anaconda simply could not keep up with incoming requests for packages. This is why to this day there are still nearly four times as many packages available on conda-forge compared to Anaconda's main channel.

With all that in mind, maybe it would be best to take what you've written and create a new page for it and then link to it from the first pages in the documentation? (/docs)

Happy to hear others' thoughts on this too.

[jjerphan]

Thank you for those comments, @travishathaway!

I think this would be a much better addition as single, "What is conda-forge?" page.

I also think this deserves a dedicated page given the comprehensive content.

I will adapt the notes according to your suggestions.