running air in corporate setting

[m-muecke]

I'm running Positron in a corporate setting on Windows with limited admin rights. Installing system level Positron works as expected, but the air extension fails unless I open Positron as an admin or copy the air extension from the user to the system directory i.e.

Copy-Item -Path "C:\Users\mmuecke\.positron\extensions\posit.air-vscode-0.14.0-win32-x64" -Destination "C:\Program Files\Positron\resources\app\extensions\" -Recurse

Is there another solution for this?

[lionel-]

Did you install Air by yourself or are you using the one bundled with Positron? If the latter, I'm surprised the extension is in the user directory.

What failure messages or indications do you see? Is there anything in the Air logs?

[lionel-]

@timtmok @jmcphers Melissa is on leave and I see you've reviewed her PRs for bundled extensions. Do you expect a bundled extension to be installed in the user directory?

hmm we install from here:

positron/src/vs/platform/extensionManagement/node/positronBootstrapExtensionsInitializer.ts

Line 118 in 90b4e5c

await this.extensionManagementService.install(vsix.resource, { donotIncludePackAndDependencies: true, keepExisting: false });

We can pass these options, profileLocation could be relevant:

positron/src/vs/platform/extensionManagement/common/extensionManagement.ts

Line 557 in 90b4e5c

export type InstallOptions = {

For reference, if I'm not mistaken the install call ends up here down the line:

positron/src/vs/platform/extensionManagement/common/abstractExtensionManagementService.ts

Line 277 in 90b4e5c

protected async installExtensions(extensions: InstallableExtension[]): Promise<InstallExtensionResult[]> {

So it seems like we could potentially set profileLocation to point to the system dir. But I would guess this would require elevated privileges at launch time? Or does the bootstrap install happen at install time? Even in the latter case, would manual updates by the user work properly?

[timtmok]

Is this a situation where a system install was used because Positron should be available to all users on the system? It looks like Air extension installed successfully but it's unable to run because of permissions. If possible, I would recommend using the user installer where it would install extensions to the user directory.

I'm curious if this is also a problem with Quarto since it is also bundled and will run an executable when rendering.

This is sounding like a bug with system installs and extensions (that need to run an executable) that has a limit on permissions with a system install.

[m-muecke]

Is this a situation where a system install was used because Positron should be available to all users on the system? It looks like Air extension installed successfully but it's unable to run because of permissions. If possible, I would recommend using the user installer where it would install extensions to the user directory.

I'm curious if this is also a problem with Quarto since it is also bundled and will run an executable when rendering.

This is sounding like a bug with system installs and extensions (that need to run an executable) that has a limit on permissions with a system install.

To provide some context, users have temporary admin rights that they can use to install software or open an executable. Installing with admin rights works for the user-level version, but then the admin rights must be activated each time Positron is opened. The solution is to install Positron at the system level, which allows you to open it without using admin rights. When I open Positron as an admin, Air also works when it is installed in the user directory. However, moving Air to the system directory allows me to open it without admin rights.

[jmcphers]

Do you expect a bundled extension to be installed in the user directory?

Yes, bundled extensions get installed to the user directory intentionally. That way users (in theory) have permission to update the extensions, etc.

This appears to be a unique permissions environment in which admin rights are required to run executables in the user's own home directory, but not executables in the system directory.

@lionel- What if we bundled air with positron (like we do quarto, pandoc, etc)? Seems like that would work around this but then we need to think about handling versioning between the air executable and the air extension.

[lionel-]

@jmcphers That's an interesting idea, maybe we could discuss this topic during our sync next week.