Create more minimal examles of environment.yml files about otter-grader HOT 2 OPEN

The docker image build process is getting stuck : after investigations, we found out that our docker server is hosted somewhere where the "defaults" channel is not accessible. Downloads from the "defaults" channel receive HTTP 429... + retry in ~ 7 hours.

Side note: this happens when the organization is "in violation of Anaconda's terms of use". I don't know exactly what is going on for our hosting partner, but I'm SURE it falls into the exceptions since it is a public provider for the academic world here in Switzerland (switch.ch).

Anyway, I have not found a way to customize the environment.yml file generation ; we have to fix it manually, inside the .zip, file between the 'assign' and 'grade' steps.

Would you consider removing the problematic 'defaults' channel? or providing a way to get it removed on request?

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@joelostblom for Python environments, otter includes some packages by default as a legacy from its roots as an autograder designed for data science courses. I agree that we could trim out all of the dependencies not specifically required by otter, but that's a breaking change (not sure how many users rely on those packages so that they don't need to use their own requirements.txt). The R dependencies are another matter -- all of the listed dependencies besides r-base, r-devtools, and r-ottr were added to fix issues with images builds as they cropped up. I'm not sure if it will be possible to remove them without breaking R image builds. That being said, I do agree that these environments are bloated, and it would be nice to slim them down; I'm just not sure how much it will be possible. I'm tagging this for v6 but it may get pushed to a later major version depending on whether I get a chance to look into it.

@nibheis thanks for pointing this out. It should be relatively easy to add a configuration that allows you to remove the defaults channel from the environment.yml files produced by otter; I've opened #778 as an FR for that.

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