The Anaconda team has announced a new release of Anaconda Distribution 5.2. This new version has brought several new changes in terms of platform changes, user-facing challenges, and backend improvements.
Anaconda is a free open-source distribution of Python which allows fast, easier and powerful way to perform data science and machine learning tasks. It is an efficient platform used for carrying out large-scale data processing, scientific computing and more. With over 6 million users, it includes more than 250 data science packages suitable for all major operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. Every package version is managed by the package management system conda.
Some of the noteworthy changes available in Anaconda Distribution 5.2 are:
Major highlights
- More than 100 packages have been updated or added to the new release of Anaconda Distribution 5.2 (Notable Updates includes – Qt v5.9.5, OpenSSL v1.0.2o, NumPy 1.14.3, SciPy v1.1.0, Matplotlib v2.2.2, and Pandas 0.23.0).
- Now Windows installers control their environment more carefully. Thus even if menu shortcuts fail to get created, it won’t lead to a lot of installation issues.
- macOS pkg installers developer certificate is now updated to Anaconda, Inc.
User-facing improvements
- All default channels now point to repo.anaconda.com instead of repo.continuum.io
- Now you have more dynamic shortcut working directory behavior thus improving Windows multi-user installations
- To prevent usability issues, Windows installers now disallow the characters (! % ^ =) in the installation path.
Backend improvements
- Security fixes done for more than 20 packages based on in-depth Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) vulnerabilities.
- Improved behavior of –prune because of history file being updated correctly in the conda-meta directory
- Windows Installer will now use a trimmed down value for PATH env var, to avoid DLL hell problems with existing software
In addition to these, several new changes have been added to all x86 platforms, Linux distributions, and windows distributions. For the complete list of new changes, you can refer the release notes.
In case you want to download the new version of Anaconda Distribution 5.2, you can get the file from the official page. Alternatively, you can update the current Anaconda Distribution platform to version 5.2 by using conda update conda followed by conda install anaconda=5.2.