The NAU team posted this excellent write up of how they use Anaconda to find software. What does your institution recommend? (Click on the caret in the top right corner to read the post inline and the post your reply here on the main Discussion Zone).
Although this is not a recommendation for searching for software on anconda.org, but I have used anaconda.org to troubleshooting rebuilding a conda environment. I encountered this issue when a researcher wants to share the exact copy of their environment with another researcher. The approach is to activate the environment and then use the -explicit flag to generate the environment input file.
conda list --explicit > my_env_pkgs.txt
The researcher who wants to recreate this environment uses the text file to recreate it, but it will fail indicating it is unable to find a package because the URL provided doesn’t exist. So I used the specified build hash to search anaconda.org for the file. What I discovered was that there are multiple builds of the same version of the package, but they will have different labels. One such label is “broken”. From what I understand, a build may be marked broken if there is a bug, or another issue with it, and it will be replaced with another build that fixes the problem but with a different built hash. The original will be labelled “broken” and will not be found by the conda create command. Below is a link to all the broken GDAL builds listed on anaconda.org:
Files :: Anaconda.org
To resolve this issue, one can update the package URL in my_env_pkgs.txt file so that it points to the new location of the package with the label “broken”. Or update the my_env_pkgs.txt file so that it will install the updated non-broken package. Which solution is chosen will depend if an exact replica of the the original environment is desired for reproducibility, or not.