We are changing versioning in Anaconda Distribution from a major/minor version scheme to a year.month scheme. We made this change to differentiate between the open source Anaconda Distribution and Anaconda Enterprise, our managed data science platform. Conda, will continue to use a major/minor versioning scheme.
The number of 32-bit x86 Linux packages downloaded are a small fraction of downloads from Anaconda. As of this release, we no longer build 32-bit packages for Linux, aside from critical bug fixes. Linux 32 packages will reach end of life as of June 2019.
There were a number of improvements with conda 4.5.12. In response to community input, activating conda environments is consistent across all operating systems. With conda performance improvements, installing packages takes less time, especially with noarch packages.
A number of commonly used packages were updated with openssl 1.1.1 including Python 3.7. Openssl 1.1.1 is now the Long Term Support (LTS) version that will be supported for at least 5 years.
On Windows, the reliance of Python 2.7 on the Visual Studio 2008 compiler has prevented inclusion of openssl 1.1.1 (Qt versions compatible with openssl 1.1.1 can’t be built with VS 2008). Python 2.7 on Windows is increasingly difficult to support because of these compiler restrictions and we anticipate that this trend of being unable to update software on Python 2.7 on Windows will continue. We strongly recommend adopting Python 3 if you are on the Windows platform. Python 3 on Windows use newer Visual Studio compilers that allow us to support the full range of modern software.
In addition to these new features, we’ve updated or added over 100 packages. Full release notes for Anaconda Distribution 2018.12 can be found here. Download and install Anaconda Distribution 2018.12 now, or update your current Anaconda Distribution installation to the new version by using conda update conda followed by conda install anaconda=2018.12
