The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan carefully

Question

I tried to update or install new packages from anaconda and lately, this message has appeared:

The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan         


        

Answer 1

Given a situation like the following,

> conda update -c intel --all
Collecting package metadata: done
Solving environment: |
The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan carefully
The following packages are causing the inconsistency:

  - intel/win-64::ipython==6.3.1=py36_3
  - intel/win-64::prompt_toolkit==1.0.15=py36_2
done

As mentioned in other answers, the idea is to have some sort of re-installation to occur for the inconsistent packages.

Thus, with a few copy-&-paste's, you could:

> conda install intel/win-64::ipython==6.3.1=py36_3
Collecting package metadata: done
Solving environment: /
The environment is inconsistent, please check the package plan carefully
The following packages are causing the inconsistency:

  - intel/win-64::ipython==6.3.1=py36_3
  - intel/win-64::prompt_toolkit==1.0.15=py36_2
done

## Package Plan ##

  environment location: c:\conda

  added / updated specs:
    - ipython


The following NEW packages will be INSTALLED:

  jedi               intel/win-64::jedi-0.12.0-py36_2
  parso              intel/win-64::parso-0.2.0-py36_2
  pygments           intel/win-64::pygments-2.2.0-py36_5
  wcwidth            intel/win-64::wcwidth-0.1.7-py36_6


Proceed ([y]/n)? y

Preparing transaction: done
Verifying transaction: done
Executing transaction: done

(and you would have to repeat for all the packages)

---

My “Shortcut”

Alternatively, cook up an (ugly) one-liner (this should work for Windows as well as other platforms)

Note: by "ORIGINAL_COMMAND", I'm referring to any command that gives you the error message (without any other side-effects, ideally)

 2>&1 | python -c "import sys,re,conda.cli; conda.cli.main('conda','install','-y',*re.findall(r'^\s*-\s*(\S+)$',sys.stdin.read(),re.MULTILINE))"

Expanding the above one-liner:

from re import findall, MULTILINE
from sys import stdin
from conda.cli import main

main(
    "conda", "install", "-y",
    "--force",  # Maybe add a '--force'/'--force-reinstall' (I didn't add it for the one-liner above)
    *findall(r"^\s*-\s*(\S+)$", stdin.read(), MULTILINE)  # Here are the offenders
)