Build/Package Positron from Source

[kv9898]

It is great that Positron is fully open source, which allows for external contribution and DIY tweaks! Nevertheless, it seems that Positron has not provided guidance on how to build it from source. I have been following VSCode's instruction, which also works for Positron for debugging. However, the VSCode packaging instruction doesn't work for packaging Positron, AFAICT. I'm running from Windows and I always encounter the following error:

Error: EMFILE: too many open files, open 'D:\a\positron\positron\extensions\positron-python\python_files\posit\positron\_vendor\jedi\third_party\typeshed\third_party\2and3\google\protobuf\source_context_pb2.pyi'

168Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

[jmcphers]

Thanks for reporting! This is a known issue with building Positron releases on Windows. We're tracking it here: #6269

[kv9898]

Thanks for pointing to the issue, it feels better to know that the development team also ran into this problem! I'm really wondering how Positron releases are built, though. I have been looking through Positron's GitHub Workflows to bypass this issue, but there doesn't seem to be a ready-to-go build workflow.

[juliasilge]

We have been talking about when/how to write up an external contributor guide so thank you for your patience as we figure that out. It's amazing that you have been able to contribute without this already! We appreciate your interest and willingness to just get in there and give it a go. 🙌

[kv9898]

@juliasilge It's been my pleasure to contribute to Positron! There's one other thing, though. On GitHub, the latest pre-release (03.0-116) comes with commit (38adc0f), but the installer comes with an older commit ([7f0f938]7f0f938). I'm not sure whether it has always been/meant to be like this or it is to do with the new way (daily) artifacts are uploaded to the new CDN host.

I noticed this problem because I made a PR to fix the data summary persistence triggered by splitter button (#6550 ), which was merged before (38adc0f). I wished to try out this new functionality but was disappointed that it didn't come with the new pre-release. When I looked into the source code for (38adc0f), I did see the changes from my PR so I believe this is some sort of a mismatch.

[petetronic]

Thanks @kv9898 we see the issue and we'll fix that.

[petetronic]

Pre-release 2025.03.0-116 is commit 7f0f938 from the prerelease/2025.03 branch, we've updated the releases to reflect that (and made a fix so that shouldn't happen on the next pre-release).