Create conda environment: “Found conflicts!” when solving environment and “Finding shortest conflict path” running forever

Question

I was provided with an environment.ubuntu.yml file to be able to create a conda environment. However, running conda create env --file environment.ubuntu.y

Answer 1

In general, the answer to this question is that you should create your .yml from hand by scratch, with only the required channels and constraints. You should relax the version constraints so that they only look like 1.19 instead of 1.19.10

However, despite following this advice, I have almost exactly your problem right now. It spent many hours on fontconfig and I left it overnight before giving up. My spec is pretty simple:

channels:
  - conda-forge
  - usgs-astrogeology
  - defaults
dependencies:
  - python=3.6
  - isis3
  - gdal=2.3

I'll edit this when I figure it out.

EDIT: This problem is under discussion here (specific to the software I was trying to set up, probably not helpful for others) https://github.com/USGS-Astrogeology/ISIS3/issues/3570