posit-dev
Positron Assistant doesn't know what version of Positron is running
System details:
Edge on Windows 11
Positron and OS details:
Positron Version: 2025.06.0 build 107 Code - OSS Version: 1.99.0 Commit: 74fd52a2bde0b2d9fe1f9cd38e6f41687a62bced Date: 2025-05-20T03:38:53.564Z Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/136.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/136.0.0.0
Interpreter details:
Console: R 4.4.0 or Python 3.12.4 Assistant: Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 Bedrock
Describe the issue:
The Assistant doesn't know what version of Positron is running.
Steps to reproduce the issue:
- Start up the Assistant.
- Ask:
What version of Positron is this?
Expected or desired behavior:
The version of Positron that's running.
Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?
No error message. The Assistant responded with:
I apologize, but I don't have access to information about which version of Positron is currently running.
followed by a bunch of stuff. I also asked it:
How can I find out what version of Positron this is?
It responded with:
I apologize, but I don't have a direct tool or method to determine the specific version of Positron that's currently running. None of the tools provided to me (executeCode, inspectVariables, getPlot, getAttachedPackages, getInstalledPackageVersion, positron_getProjectTree_internal, positron_findTextInProject_internal, positron_getFileContents_internal) include functionality to query the Positron version number.
To find out the version number, you would need to:
Check the application's About menu or Help section in the user interface
Look for version information in the application's documentation
Contact Positron support
Check any version information that might be displayed in the main application window
I cannot programmatically retrieve this information using the available tools.
I was looking for Positron's equivalent of RStudio.Version() or so.
On the plus side, it knows that it's based on VS Code. Question:
What is Positron based on?
Response:
Positron appears to be based on Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
followed by more stuff.
The "answer" here is to use Sys.getenv("POSITRON_VERSION"); I wonder if we could be more explicit with Positron Assistant that there are environment variables it can check, for various bits of info.
We could also give it a tool to check the version, or expose it in the context.
