- Document a well-defined small and useful interface to conda, which is stable across many conda versions.
- Allow users to easily interact conda from any environment (in fact from any Python process on the same machine). As conda always only resides in the so-called root environment, it is not possible to import conda from any additional environments. For this purpose, the conda-api supports (at least) Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.3, whereas conda itself will always (at least for the foreseeable future will only support Python 2.7).
- Most functionality will be implemented by calling the conda command in a sub-process. To process the output from the conda sub-process, conda may, e.g. write json to stdout.
- Very trivial functionality (such as returning the list of named environments, i.e. basically a listing of the envs directory), are implemented in this library directory.