TL/DR: Is there really no way to just tell jupyter console to run in some conda environment, without first unnecessarily installing (and hence depending on) Jupyter in that environment?
I really did try to make this not appear entirely like a rant... I hope you see there is an actual question here.
It seems like getting Jupyter to work with conda environments requires either
- Installing a new Jupyter in every conda environment you want to use, or
- Installing ipykernel in every conda environment you want to use (which depends on the jupyter package...), and creating a new kernel from within the environment.
I find this a bit astonishing, since I do not think of Jupyter as a requirement of the project, but rather as just another editor/IDE-like thing, making use of environments. Conda's purpose is to manage reproducible dependencies; Jupyter's should be to interpret code within the environment I tell it. Since I'd like to store the environment.yml in git and share it with others, I see no purpose in also requiring them to install Jupyter; they might not even use it.
Yet, it seems not to work that way at all. It feels like when I would like to use Emacs to make use of an environment, I'd have to install an "emacskernel" package in every environment. That's not how it works.
What I would like is to have one globally installed Jupyter, which can just be pointed to different environments -- similar to how the Julia REPL with julia --project=... works (yeah I know that conda is not a built-into-the-language package manager, but you should get the analogy...). (This would kinda work if conda environments would "inherit", i.e., fall back to the "global environment" for unfound dependencies, and you could just use the global Jupyter from within each one; but as I understand, they don't?)
Is this possible at all? What am I missing? Are there any better alternatives providing global Jupyter + local environments? (I must admit I have never used virtualenv or the like...)
(This older question seems to cover the same topic for pipenv, but there's not real answer there... neither a definite NO, nor an explaination why.)
