It is an overkill for pure-python packages or packages with simple C extensions. Conda was developed specifically to handle non-python dependencies, which would be difficult to build in setup.py.
Also, a conda package is not a replacement for a distutils/setuptools package. When building a conda package, one still calls setup.py. So every python conda package has to be a distutils/setuptools package anyway.
Thanks for caveat. Nonetheless, anaconda makes my life so much easier when working with python libraries. If anybody got any other reasons to be careful of it, I'm interested!
conda environments support pip and arbitrary pip commands. So if you use pip to for example install a specific version of a library directly from github that information will be stored in your conda environment and be reproduced every time you recreate your environments.
