Can you explain that to me? I'm not sure I'm following.

What happens if a user selects to not install shortcuts and there are packages with shortcuts in the payload?

If we didn't explicitly call menuinst --install before conda install:

1. conda install runs
2. No packages have Menu json files → conda never calls menuinst
3. menuinst.toml is never created
4. Because of 3) the value of MENUINST_DISTRIBUTION_NAME is never captured

Then as you can probably see, later (assuming above happened), when a user installs a package with shortcuts into this environment:

1. conda calls menuinst to create shortcuts
2. MENUINST_DISTRIBUTION_NAME is no longer set (installer finished long ago)
3. menuinst.toml doesn't exist (was never created)
4. menuinst falls back to deriving distribution_name from the prefix name → "base"

The explicit menuinst --install call ensures distribution_name is written to menuinst.toml now, while the env var is still set, regardless of whether any packages have shortcuts. This way the value is available for any future shortcut creation.

That part I understand, but not Must run before conda install to avoid creating shortcuts twice. Where would we create shortcuts twice?

Ahh, yeah I see that it's misleading. The comment was based upon a change I made earlier that didn't work which resulted in duplicated calls to menuinst. Removed, see 5a279c5

So, what happens if there are packages with shortcuts in the environment? Won't this run menuinst twice? What happens if a user selects not to install shortcuts and the environment has packages with shortcuts?

So since this is called before any packages are installed, all it does is creating menuinst.toml, and this will happen regardless or not if the user chooses to (or not to) install shortcuts via the installer.

This is how I understand the menuinst workflow: If you don't give menuinst a list of packages, it will install all shortcuts in the prefix. So, if there is a prefix with packages that install shortcuts, this command will install them before installing the conda package. More importantly, it will install shortcuts even if the user selected not to install shortcuts because there is no guard.

This is the sequence right now:

1. Payload tarball is extracted into %INSTDIR%
2. Packages are extracted into %BASE_PATH%\pkgs\<name> (importantl that they're not considered installed yet
3. menuinst --install runs, and right now %BASE_PATH%\Menu\ is empty and no .json files exist
4. conda install runs which will populate (if packages with shortcuts are installed) the %BASE_PATH%\Menu directory

But at step 3 above, the important detail is that there are no .json files in the Menu directory, which results in only menuinst.toml being generated containing the value of distribution_name.

Ah, great. Can you point that out in the comment? This isn't an immediately obvious detail.

See 6b6306d