Package cache priorities / permissions (Windows)

[Will Furnass]

Hi,

We have a managed Windows environment where:

 * We want to install Anaconda in C:\Anaconda, which is read-only for users;
 * Users are able to create their own environments under U:\

Anaconda was installed and the following environment variables set for all users:

  * CONDA_ENVS_PATH=U:\envs;C:\Anaconda\envs
  * PYTHONUSERBASE=u:\

However, attempts to create environments as unprivileged users result in permissions errors as it appears that conda is trying to write to c:\anaconda\pkgs, even though it is not the preferred package cache:

             platform : win-64
        conda version : 4.1.11
    conda-env version : 2.5.2
  conda-build version : 1.21.3
       python version : 3.5.2.final.0
     requests version : 2.10.0
     root environment : C:\Anaconda  (read only)
  default environment : C:\Anaconda
     envs directories : U:\envs
                        C:\Anaconda\envs
        package cache : U:\envs\.pkgs
                        C:\Anaconda\pkgs
         channel URLs : https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/win-64/
                        https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/free/noarch/
                        https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/pro/win-64/
                        https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/pro/noarch/
                        https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/msys2/win-64/
                        https://repo.continuum.io/pkgs/msys2/noarch/
          config file : None
         offline mode : False
    is foreign system : False

Has anyone else experienced this on Windows?  Any suggestions?

Regards,

Will

[Wolfgang Ulmer]

Hi,
we have a similar setup in our company and similar problems, see my comment on another pull request.
When I read your post here, I just thought about asking my IT department to manually grant all users access to the system package cache. However this might only fix the symptom, not the root cause.
We are still running Anaconda 2.1 here, which still works (after I fixed a few issues with activate scripts).
I really would like to upgrade to Anaconda 4.x, but every new version seems to bring some new Windows bugs.
Regards,
Wolfgang