Support for creating environment files from conda lock files

[tylerpotts]

A very frequent pattern for the data scientists I manage is using jupyter notebooks for development and the productionalizing with Metaflow.

Right now the Jupyter Notebook -> Metaflow python conda environment transition is a friction point.

Ideally we'd like to solve the environment once, lock it with a conda lock file, and then use that lock file throughout the life of that version of the code. We also cache our python packages with an artifactory so this adds a fairly nice confidence of reproducibility.

@romain-intel I put some work in trying to figure out how to get the conda lock file input working a while ago but got pulled into other projects. I seem to remember you saying it wouldn't be a big lift. Any chance you could consider implementing this feature?

In the short term I don't anticipate having the bandwidth to get the necessary context in this project to add the functionality myself.

[romain-intel]

I think it would be easily possible to do in some cases. If you always go through conda to create your environment, that would work well (ie: conda would know about everything). If, however, you used conda and then pip, it may be harder to determine. It actually came up a few days ago internally as well. It sounds like your use case would fall more in the first category (ie: conda knows everything). I can't promise any timeline but let me see when I can get this in. You are right that it would be a very cool feature.