whl2conda changes¶

[26.7.2] - 2026-7-13¶

Bug fixes¶

• --resolve-extras no longer fails to resolve extras of packages whose pypi metadata does not populate provides_extra (which is commonly null even when the extras exist); the extra's entries in Requires-Dist are now authoritative. Found by a new external test exercising the real pypi.org metadata API.

Features¶

• whl2conda build now supports v1 (recipe.yaml) recipes, as built by rattler-build, in addition to classic (meta.yaml) recipes. v1 recipes are rendered with the py-rattler-build python package when it is importable and otherwise with the rattler-build command; the recipe's tests: list is run against the generated package (in a single shared test environment). v1 recipes must declare noarch: python. (#160)
• whl2conda build now runs the recipe build script in the recipe's source directory (conda-build's source work directory when populated, otherwise the recipe's local path: source), instead of the current directory, so it no longer needs to be invoked from the project root.
• New "Building from Recipes" user guide documentation page.
• whl2conda build now supports most applicable conda build options: the build modes --output (print the predicted package path without building), -t/--test (test the already-built package), -b/--build-only, and --skip-existing, plus --output-folder, --package-format, --croot, --python, -q/--quiet, and --debug. Inapplicable conda build options are accepted and ignored with a warning, except upload/signing and non-python language options, which are rejected with an error. (#110)

• New whl2conda build extension options: --check renders the recipe and verifies whl2conda can build it, without building anything; --extra-deps adds conda dependencies to the generated package; --keep-test-env keeps the test environment for debugging; and --mamba uses mamba to create test environments and to run conda-build when it must be run in the base environment. (#110)

• Package tests for the generated conda package can now be specified in [[tool.whl2conda.tests]] in pyproject.toml, using the v1 recipe tests schema, or in a standalone YAML file; the new tool.whl2conda.test-python option lists python versions to test against. (#190)

• New whl2conda test command tests a conda package file in a fresh environment, using tests from a --test-file YAML file, the pyproject.toml [tool.whl2conda.tests] section, or the test section of a conda recipe, optionally against multiple python versions. (#83)

Changes¶

• whl2conda build renders recipes into its own temporary work directory (instead of scraping conda-build console output to locate scratch space in conda-bld), checks the exit status of the render, uses conda-build in-process when it is importable, and reports build errors clearly. (#110)

Bug fixes¶

• The build string of generated noarch packages now includes the build number (e.g. py_1) instead of always being py_0. (#110)

Development¶

• Extracted the package test logic from whl2conda build into a shared, reusable test runner supporting both classic recipe test: sections and v1 recipe tests: lists, in preparation for whl2conda test (#83) and pyproject test specifications (#190). The recipe test.source_files entries are now honored (they were previously ignored).

[26.7.1] - 2026-7-12¶

Bug fixes¶

• Dependencies with extras (name[extra,...]) now generate a warning when the extras are dropped, instead of dropping them silently, and dependency rename rules are matched against the bracketed form first so such dependencies can be mapped to a corresponding conda package (e.g. dask[complete] to dask). For a built-in table of common extras with dedicated conda-forge packages (e.g. uvicorn[standard], ray[default], black[jupyter]), the warning names the corresponding conda package. (#217)

Features¶

• New --known-extras option automatically replaces dependency extras from the built-in table of common extras with dedicated conda-forge packages (e.g. uvicorn[standard] with uvicorn-standard). (#217)
• New --resolve-extras option resolves remaining dependency extras from pypi.org metadata: the extra's dependencies are read from the newest release satisfying the dependency's version spec, converted like regular dependencies, and any nested extras are resolved recursively. This is a best-effort approximation, since the solver may install a version whose extras differ. (#36)

Changes¶

• New runtime dependency on packaging (used to select release versions when resolving extras from pypi metadata; it was already used opportunistically for dependency marker evaluation).

[26.7.0] - 2026-7-11¶

Features¶

• Convert stable ABI (abi3) wheels into a single conda package usable on all supported python versions, following the CEP-20 layout: the python dependency is only a lower bound, and files are installed using the noarch python machinery (#183)
• The --python option now overrides the automatically generated python version pin for binary (--allow-impure) conversions (#183)
• New --for-conda-forge option (synonym: --for-cpython) adds the CEP-20 python pins used by conda-forge (cpython and _python_abi3_support) when converting stable ABI (abi3) wheels (#194)
• whl2conda diff now semantically analyzes the differences between two conda packages by default, reporting notable and unexpected differences while suppressing differences expected between whl2conda-generated and recipe-built packages. The -T/--diff-tool option is now optional and selects the previous raw diff behavior. The analysis engine is also available programmatically as whl2conda.api.compare.
• New --platform-tag option selects the wheel platform tag to convert for when converting a multi-platform ("fat") binary wheel (#201)
• New --all-platforms option generates a conda package for every platform supported by the wheel, each written into a <subdir>/ subdirectory of the output directory (#204)

Changes¶

• Binary wheel conversion (--allow-impure) is no longer labeled experimental: conversions of representative C, C++, Cython, rust, and abi3 extension packages are verified to be semantically equivalent to the corresponding conda-forge packages on linux, macOS, and windows by the new comparison suite. The converter now emits a targeted warning when a wheel bundles vendored shared libraries (the main remaining limitation) instead of a blanket experimental warning on every binary conversion.
• whl2conda install no longer checks the conda-libmamba-solver version or switches target environments to the classic solver. That workaround was only needed for conda-libmamba-solver older than 24.1.0, which fixed the underlying file-install issue (conda-libmamba-solver#418). This also removes a crash when conda-libmamba-solver was not installed in the base environment.

Development¶

• Documentation is now generated with Zensical instead of the no-longer-maintained MkDocs/mkdocs-material (#173)
• New external comparison test suite (pixi run compare-conda-forge) converts a curated sample of binary PyPI packages and semantically compares the results against the corresponding conda-forge packages, building evidence toward removing the experimental label from binary conversion. Supersedes the research/compare_packages.py prototype, which has been removed.

Bug fixes¶

• The timestamp in the package's index.json is now written in milliseconds since the epoch, matching conda-build and rattler-build. It was previously written in seconds and was also incorrectly shifted by the local timezone offset. (#193)
• whl2conda diff no longer fails on packages that do not contain an info/files entry, e.g. packages built by rattler-build (#192)
• Packages converted on Windows no longer contain backslash path separators in info/paths.json and info/files, which violated the conda package format (#203)

[26.2.1] - 2026-7-9¶

Bug fixes¶

• Dependency names that do not match any rename rule are again passed through with their original spelling, instead of being rewritten to their PEP 503 normalized form. This restores pre-26.2.0 behavior for packages whose conda name contains _, . or uppercase characters. (#184)
• Dependency rename patterns are now matched against both the name as written in the wheel metadata and its PEP 503 normalized form, so patterns containing _ or . work again. (#184)

Development¶

• Automated release workflow: pushing a version tag publishes to PyPI (trusted publishing), creates the GitHub release, and deploys the versioned documentation (#145)

[26.2.0] - 2026-2-22¶

Features¶

• Experimental support for converting binary (non-pure Python) wheels via --allow-impure flag
• Support parsing name from Poetry 2.0 pyproject.toml
• Handle bad UTF-8 in METADATA files
• Support wheel metadata version 2.5 (PEP 770) - SBOM documents

Bug fixes¶

• Normalize PyPI package names per PEP 503 when applying dependency renames (#134)
• Show user-friendly error message when wheel download from PyPI fails (#125)

Changes¶

• Drop support for python 3.9
• Internal code refactoring and cleanup

Development¶

• Switched to pixi for development environment management

[25.3.0] - 2025-3-20¶

Features¶

• Support metadata version 2.4 (PEP 688)
• Added --allow-metadata-version option to convert command

Changes¶

• Drops support for python 3.8

[24.5.0] - 2024-5-5¶

Features¶

• Added persistent user settings for:
  • default conda format
  • whether to automatically update stdrenames table
  • specify aliases for extra pypi indexes

[24.4.0] - 2024-4-14¶

Changes¶

• Only use classic installer in whl2conda install environments if conda-libmamba-solver in base environment has version less than 24.1.0 (see #118)

Bug fixes¶

• Transfer executable file permissions from wheel (#135)
• Correct typos in documentation.

[24.1.2] - 2024-1-28¶

Features¶

• Support whl2conda convert --python override.
• Added one-line description to whl2conda package

[24.1.1] - 2024-1-15¶

Features¶

• Support conversion of wheels containing *.data directories
• Support direct download of wheels to convert from pypi repositories

[24.1.0] - 2024-1-8¶

Features¶

• Add whl2conda build - limited experimental drop-in replacement for conda build
• Support translation of ~= and === version specification operators.
• whl2conda install now supports installing multiple package files at once

Bug fixes¶

• Use classic installer in whl2conda install environments to work around conda bug (#114)
• Include project URLs in metadata that have multi-word keys (#113)
• Write METADATA file in dist-info using UTF8 (#112)

[23.9.0] - 2023-9-23¶

• First official stable release

[23.8.10] - 2023-9-16 (prerelease)¶

• Fix generation of entry points
• Adjust metadata generation
• Add whl2conda diff subcommand

[23.8.9] - 2023-9-14 (prerelease)¶

• Support python -m whl2conda
• Fix issue with license copying

[23.8.8] - 2023-9-10 (prerelease)¶

• hide pip build wheel output with --quiet

[23.8.7] - 2023-9-9 (prerelease)¶

• first conda-forge release