"pip install ." is needlessly (and sometimes extremely) slow because it copies all the files in the conda installation

I noticed that this job took over 15 minutes on appletini just to get to the point where the software was installed. After re-running the job manually to see what was going on, I observed that the command pip install . was extremely slow. The problem is that pip install . copies the whole directory to perform a build. Since the conda installation is copied along with this, it takes a long time. It's particularly a problem on appletini where file operations are pretty slow.

I think there are two ways around this:

1. Install in editable mode
2. Install conda in a separate directory. Does gitlab allow this?