I fiddled with my VM and looked at a miniconda installations and figured out how conda "normally" works.
The default behavior is to act kind of like a venv. The conda scripts and supporting files get copied into an install directory with a python interpreter and lib/python3 files. That ends up setting sys.prefix in to the install directory which is used to determine the root_prefix and thus where things will get installed. I was able to fake it by symlinking the debian python interpreters into $install_dir/bin/python3.9 setting that to the shebang path and adding this pyvenv.cfg to $install_dir home = /usr/bin include-system-site-packages = true version = 3.9.7 then running $install_dir/bin/conda init bash and it updated the scripts and added conda's shell initialization hook to the end of my .bashrc (And after all that and relogging conda create --name snowflake biopython did work) There might be another way to override the root_prefix to get this all working. Also the /usr/bin/conda that gets installed by setup.py tries to run conda.cli.main_pip, and it seems like maybe that should be changed to create the $install_dir, and I think that might be unimplemented by upstream. And that's enough from me for today. Diane
