PET conda locator fails to find conda manager for Windows conda installations accessed via WSL /mnt/ paths

[karthiknadig]

Problem

When running inside WSL2, PET discovers conda environments from a Windows-side Anaconda installation mounted at /mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda/. It correctly identifies conda_dir = "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda" from conda environment metadata, but then fails to locate a conda executable because:

• On Unix, get_conda_executable() only looks for bin/conda
• Windows Anaconda installs place the executable at Scripts/conda.exe (or condabin/conda.bat)
• The Windows executable at /mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda/Scripts/conda.exe is a Windows PE binary and not directly usable from WSL

This produces many error log lines like:

ERROR pet_conda: Unable to find Conda Manager for Conda env (even though we have a conda_dir "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"): Env Details = CondaEnvironment { prefix: "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda/envs/deepseek", executable: None, version: None, conda_dir: Some("/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"), arch: None }

These errors repeat for every environment under the Windows conda installation, spamming the logs and slowing down Conda locator performance (6+ seconds, dominating the total refresh time).

How environments are discovered

The user likely has entries from the Windows-side Anaconda in ~/.conda/environments.txt or .condarc (which can be shared between Windows and WSL). PET then resolves each environment's conda_dir from conda-meta/history or the parent directory structure, finds /mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda, but cannot locate a usable conda binary there.

User setup

• OS: WSL2 (Debian) on Windows 11
• WSL conda: Miniforge3 at /home/user/miniforge3/bin/conda — works correctly
• Windows conda: Anaconda at D:\Tools\Anaconda (mounted as /mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda in WSL)
• Shell: Fish
• Reported in Conda Error caused by wrong activate command vscode-python-environments#1313

Relevant code

• Error is emitted at crates/pet-conda/src/lib.rs line ~302 in Locator::find()
• Manager lookup at crates/pet-conda/src/manager.rs — get_conda_executable() only checks bin/conda on Unix
• Environment discovery via crates/pet-conda/src/environment_locations.rs

Suggested fix options

1. Skip /mnt/ paths on WSL — Detect that a conda_dir under /mnt/ refers to a Windows filesystem and skip manager lookup (these environments are not usable from WSL anyway since the Python binaries are Windows PE executables).

2. Downgrade to warning — Change the error to a warning or verbose log to reduce log spam, since this is an expected scenario in WSL environments.

3. Detect and filter cross-OS environments early — In environment_locations.rs, when parsing environments.txt or .condarc on WSL, skip entries under /mnt/ mount points since they contain Windows binaries that cannot be executed from Linux.

Option 3 would also avoid the ~6 second Conda locator overhead from trying to resolve environments that can never work.

Logs

Full PET error logs

[pet] ERROR pet_conda: Unable to find Conda Manager for Conda env (even though we have a conda_dir "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"): Env Details = CondaEnvironment { prefix: "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda/envs/deepseek", executable: None, version: None, conda_dir: Some("/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"), arch: None }
[pet] ERROR pet_conda: Unable to find Conda Manager for Conda env (even though we have a conda_dir "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"): Env Details = CondaEnvironment { prefix: "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda", executable: None, version: None, conda_dir: Some("/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"), arch: None }
[pet] ERROR pet_conda: Unable to find Conda Manager for Conda env (even though we have a conda_dir "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"): Env Details = CondaEnvironment { prefix: "/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda/envs/emotion2", executable: None, version: None, conda_dir: Some("/mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda"), arch: None }
... (repeated for every environment under /mnt/d/Tools/Anaconda/envs/)