Living at ROOT's bleeding edge, with Conda
(19 August 2020)Sometimes ROOT users get bitten by nasty bugs, and we ROOT developers try our best to squash them as quickly as possible. New features and improvements are also constantly merged in ROOT’s main development branch, either coming from ROOT developers or as contributions from the community. Be it bug fixes or new features, however, users typically have to wait for a ROOT release that includes them to try them out. Or, you know, compile the very latest ROOT from source code – but nobody has time for that!
If you are a ROOT power user with no time to lose, or you just want to quickly try out that new feature you heard about, or you really need a bug fix that was merged yesterday to get those fancy plots done, I have good news for you! Thanks to the great folks behind ROOT’s conda package, not only you can install the latest ROOT stable version on your computer in under 5 minutes, but from today you can also install the bleeding edge, unreleased development version of ROOT from yesterday with the following one-liner:
$ conda create --name root-nightly-env -c conda-forge -c https://root.cern/download/conda-nightly/latest root-nightly
That command creates a Conda environment called root-nightly-env which contains the very latest ROOT with the very latest goodies.
To activate the environment and use that ROOT version, just call
$ conda activate root-nightly-env
The usual disclaimer about nightly builds applies: minor bugs might crop in and features might not yet be production-ready.
A big thank you goes to Chris Burr for all the help in making this happen. Also check out this nice blog post from Henry Schreiner, another maintainer of the ROOT Conda package, about the ins and outs of ROOT+Conda. All available distribution channels for ROOT nightly builds are listed at https://root.cern/install/nightlies.
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