When a new environment is created with Conda, the very first step is Collecting package metadata (repodata.json), followed by Solving environment.
What does Conda really do during the first step: is it just fetching from the Anaconda Cloud repositories the dependencies of each package listed in my environment.yml file?
Depending on the environment.yml file, step 1 can sometimes take very long: is there a way to figure out which package in environment.yml slows down the process of creating the environment?