What does “the following packages will be superseded by a higher priority channel” mean?

Question

I am trying to install fuzzywuzzy onto my Anaconda distribution in 64 bit Linux. When I do this, it tries to change my conda, and conda-env to co

Answer 1

When you ask conda to install fuzzywuzzy from conda-forge, fuzzywuzzy indicates that it needs conda and conda-env. Conda detects that you already have these installed, but it also knows that these were installed from the default channel and not conda-forge.

Now, as a user you might expect that 4.2.13-py27_0 in the default channel and in the conda-forge channel to be exactly the same (and they should) but conda can not guarantee that this is the case. The developers could very well have uploaded different packages to the default and conda-forge channels.

This would cause some really shady bugs, and in order to avoid those conda prefers to install the dependencies from the same channel as the new package. This is what the message indicates, a package getting replaced with the same package, but from a different channel which you gave higher priority by using -c conda-forge.