How to deal with the OTB dependency in the Conda package
Building the Conda package for iota2 is very involved because we need to build OTB and compile several modules which are not distributed with OTB (FeatureExtraction, Gapfilling, SLIC). Since OTB itself does not have a decent Conda package we are using a custom recipe for all this.
We should investigate another way to include OTB in our Conda package and build our OTB modules. One possibility would be to install the OTB binary distribution (using OTB's selfinstallable distribution) and then build our modules as external. This could allow us to simplify the generation of the Conda package, but there are many things that can go wrong. For instance, OTB will install its own depedencies on the Conda env and these may be incompatible with the versions of the same libs needed by other iota2 dependencies (gdal/ogr for Geopandas, for instance).