r: development documentation opens in external browser

[JosiahParry]

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2024.09.0 (Universal) build 27 Code - OSS Version: 1.92.0 Commit: d996153f3be6bcc9af460300e61103425323b973 Date: 2024-09-11T02:38:46.408Z Electron: 30.1.2 Chromium: 124.0.6367.243 Node.js: 20.14.0 V8: 12.4.254.20-electron.0 OS: Darwin arm64 23.4.0

Interpreter details:

R 4.4.1

Describe the issue:

Related https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/1025

Development documentation opens in external browser.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

• devtools::load_all()
• ?fn_name

Expected or desired behavior:

Development documentation is opened in the documentation viewer

Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?

[jennybc]

I am not able to reproduce this:

Positron Version: 2024.09.0 (Universal) build 27 Code - OSS Version: 1.92.0 Commit: d996153f3be6bcc9af460300e61103425323b973 Date: 2024-09-11T02:38:46.408Z Electron: 30.1.2 Chromium: 124.0.6367.243 Node.js: 20.14.0 V8: 12.4.254.20-electron.0 OS: Darwin arm64 22.6.0

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cc932cbe-3451-4fd2-be78-031b7bdd151a

Are you running up-to-date versions of the R packages listed here in R prerequisites?

https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/wiki#r-prerequisites

[jennybc]

Specifically, it is definitely important to have up-to-date pkgload in order to have the best experience with dev help in Positron.

[JosiahParry]

positron_deps <- c("usethis", "cli", "crayon", "rlang", "roxygen2", "pkgload")
lapply(setNames(positron_deps, positron_deps), packageVersion)
#> $usethis
#> [1] '2.2.3'
#> 
#> $cli
#> [1] '3.6.3.9000'
#> 
#> $crayon
#> [1] '1.5.2'
#> 
#> $rlang
#> [1] '1.1.4'
#> 
#> $roxygen2
#> [1] '7.3.1'
#> 
#> $pkgload
#> [1] '1.3.4'

^{Created on 2024-09-12 with reprex v2.1.0}

Here are my current versions. I will update each of them and report back

[JosiahParry]

Updating pkgload to 1.4.0.9000 fixed this. Could Positron detect that pkgload <= 1.4.0 and provide a warning in that case? I have noticed that something similar happened with roxygen2 in the past

[jennybc]

Maybe? We've talked about that. But I don't really expect this tightly coupled relationship between Positron and certain R packages to be a persistent situation long-term. It's fairly unique to being a very beta product. I feel like we have an issue that discusses whether we might want to actually build UI around this ... I'm going to search for it.

[jennybc]

Also in this case, the thing you are trying to do works (view dev help), but the experience is just nicer with a newer version of pkgload. If we start to message about "nice-to-haves", then some folks will have their reasons for using less current versions, and then they'd want a way to turn this UI off, etc. It's not a no brainer, in any case.

[jennybc]

I refreshed my memory on this: we do have and use internal facilities for guarding a hard package or package version dependency. But that's not the case here. So I feel comfortable saying that this is a just a good illustration that having the recommend pre-requisites leads to the best experience in Positron, which is still in beta.