The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope mission provides, via the Fermi Science Support Center (FSSC), a suite of data analysis tools to assist the high energy astrophysics community in working with Fermi data. For many years these tools were distributed via both precompiled binaries and source tarball downloads on the FSSC’s website. Due to the complexity of the tools and restrictions on development the downloads carried with them a large complement of third-party software which often caused package conflicts on user’s machines and bloated the size of the complete analysis package. To alleviate these problems the Fermi development team has decided to update the distribution pipeline to utilize the Conda package management system. This has allowed the development team to greatly reduce the software package size, eliminate a large category of bugs which once were prevalent, and target a decrease in software update turnaround/release time. In this talk, I will outline the process the development team took to convert our legacy codebase into a Conda compatible form and outline the lessons learned throughout this process.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): P4-3.pdf