should I "conda update conda" if I installed using brew?

Question

I'm using homebrew on macOS with apple silicon. I installed homebrew into my home directory, not /opt/Homebrew or whatever, because I'm doing everything from a standard (non-admin) user account without sudo.

The installation of conda was fine; I just did brew install --cask miniconda. However, when I did conda update conda, it said a bunch of the packages that base conda needs are outdated, and asked if I wanted to update.

I thought about it, and this is somewhat confusing; if I do brew upgrade --cask miniconda, it says "no updates needed", since I just installed it like 2 minutes ago. But what would happen if I proceeded with conda update conda? There would be a bunch of updates that conda made which brew probably doesn't know about. Would that be safe or would it lead to undefined unintended behavior / state?

Note that I have not created any envs yet, I assume conda update conda is independent of what conda env I'm in.

Answer 1

Once you’ve installed a Conda distribution, it should be self-managed. I would not use homebrew to manage it further. And yes, keep Conda updated with

conda update -n base conda

Note the specification of the environment. That is, conda update commands apply to the active environment, unless an environment is explicitly specified. The conda package itself is installed in the base environment.