Detect Pixi installation of Quarto in the VS Code Extension

[roaldarbol]

I'm installing Quarto with pixi, which means the executable is located within the project, and lives at:

.pixi/envs/default/bin/quarto

It would be great to have the VS Code extension automatically detect this installation, like it does venv and others, if a .pixi folder is present.

[cscheid]

I don't think we should be getting in the business of supporting every package manager out there. venv is effectively the Python standard and gets special treatment by VS Code, and that's why we support it. I'm sorry, but I'm going to go ahead and close this one; we don't have the resources to do this well enough, and I don't think we will in the near future.

[roaldarbol]

I think that's an unfortunate choice, especially with the extension being a cornerstone in Positron.
I personally know very few people who actually use the base venv, whereas especially conda-based tools are widely used, and uv is also getting a lot of traction. Now, uv saves into .venv by default, so I imagine that is already autodetected. All other conda venv's install into global caches (and so does Poetry); pixi is the only one that does so within the project. Python installations from pixi is already being discovered by the vs-code-python extension, and is also discovered in Positron.

As far as I can tell from the source code, you already support conda too, which is great as it's widely used. If I read the source correctly (which I may not be), you're basically just checking whether there exists a Quarto installation in the same place as the Python Interpreter is located; so essentially it's mostly relaxing some constraints in python.ts on where that is allowed to be.

It's of courser completely up to you, but I think it would be worth discussing with the Positron team too before completely dismissing the idea.

[cscheid]

To clarify:

• Positron inherits its pixi handling from their fork of Microsoft's Python extension, as you can verify by the following code search: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aposit-dev%2Fpositron+pixi&type=code

• Pixi, as of 2023, is used by at most 4% of the respondents of the Python Developers Survey, since it's not named there:
  

  In contrast, Conda accounts for 20% of the usage.

My decision is not out of a desire to not support Pixi. It's a decision based on the other things we have to support. We're happy to revisit that decision in light of more data, and if you're willing to contribute a PR, we would likely even take it. But as a feature request for us to do, I stand by my original point: I don't see it coming to the top of our priority list, and I don't think letting this issue linger open will help anyone.

[roaldarbol]

Makes complete sense, I can definitely see your points. I'm actually surprised by the numbers, but they speak for themselves.