NOTE: This is a work in progress. The author is no expert on build systems, and this serves more as a record of my experiences with conda than anything else. It is, however, sufficient for you to get to building and installing stuff with conda.
Who doesn't love pip install? A whole universe of packages on pypi, just a painless command away? Well, when you've got multiple projects with conflicting requirements, each of which have their idiosyncratic dependencies, it starts to really set in. pip's dependency resolution and optional approach to virtual environments makes using it quick and dirty, but when dirty is an unacceptable price to pay, in comes conda.
These are just my observations from mucking around with conda a bit. I'm not terribly invested in the project so forgive me if I get the history or motivation wrong, but from what I can see, it has immense potential to be a universal package manager, with the separation between virtual environments, with different sets of act