Feature request: launch or prescribe update from within application

[gvwilson]

It would be really helpful if I could run nteract and have it inspect my system and tell me things like, "You don't appear to have kernels installed, here are the commands you need to run and how to run them."

[jdetle]

Yes it would! This is totally something on my todo list. The current idea would be to have some sort of setup where we could go to help > diagnostics and have a set of scripts ready to be ran for all sorts of common issues. In addition, the ability to post an issue to github from the desktop app if these common issue fixes don't help would be desirable. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to best approach this problem @gvwilson!

[gvwilson]

This sounds like a job for [theme music] @wking - Trevor, any ideas on how best to do something like this?

[wking]

It would be really helpful if I could run nteract and have it
inspect my system and tell me things like, "You don't appear to have
kernels installed, here are the commands you need to run and how to
run them."

This is pretty much what the SWC installation scripts are 1,
although they handle “here are the command you need to run and how to
run them” by linking out to external docs 2.

Whether that approach is feasible depends on how many packages you
need to support and how consistently you can test for them. Testing a
hundred commands where you can use ‘$COMMAND --version’ is a lot
easier to maintain than testing 10 commands where you need per-command
hoop-jumping 3.

I'm not sure enough about notebook kernels to know how to check them,
but I expect they'd give you a fairly consistent way to check their
existence/functionality.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[rgbkrk]

I so want a nice way for us to do this.

[stale]

This issue hasn't had any activity on it in the last 90 days. Unfortunately we don't get around to dealing with every issue that is opened. Instead of leaving issues open we're seeking to be transparent by closing issues that aren't being prioritized. If no other activity happens on this issue in one week, it will be closed.
It's more than likely that just by me posting about this, the maintainers will take a closer look at these long forgotten issues to help evaluate what to do next.
If you would like to see this issue get prioritized over others, there are multiple avenues 🗓:

• Ask how you can help with this issue 👩🏿‍💻👨🏻‍💻
• Help solve other issues the team is currently working on 👨🏾‍💻👩🏼‍💻
• Donate to nteract so we can support developers to work on these features and bugs more regularly 💰🕐

Thank you!