Support download cache to keep original (un-extracted) files

[awesomebytes]

Problem description

This may be a cross post with an issue I posted on pixi-pack however, maybe it makes sense to request this directly on pixi.

I was trying to use pixi-pack (which is fantastic!) and I found out that it would re-download the packages I just installed in my project with pixi. Would it make any sense to add a config/flag in pixi to, optionally, also store the original files?

Thank you very much for your project :)

[nichmor]

I think we ( or pixi-pack in this case ) could use rattler-cache for this. We already have a package cache there. https://github.com/conda/rattler/blob/main/crates/rattler_cache/src/package_cache/mod.rs

it is possible to request the package record and it will reuse the one already unpacked on the disk

[pavelzw]

https://github.com/conda/rattler/blob/a06f763fca9bf8ecc752217960137595d4f49bb1/crates/rattler_cache/src/package_cache/mod.rs#L36

cache of extracted Conda packages on disk

we would need non-extracted but i think the way we solved it now in Quantco/pixi-pack#104 is fine as well (and also not really complicated) so we can probably close this issue

[awesomebytes]

I agree, closing the issue as I think the main "user" would be pixi-pack anyways, and what we implemented there does the trick :)

Thanks for your time!