Why does not set QUARTO_JULIA_PROJECT=. by default in quarto project?

[eitsupi]

Description

I'm trying out the new Julia engine, and I should add a _environment file for julia engine to recognize the Julia project in the qmd file when _quarto.yml and Project.toml are in the root directory and the qmd file is in a subdirectory.
Given that the Julia REPL starts in the root directory on VS Code, I find it compelling that QUARTO_JULIA_PROJECT=. is set by default, but is there any reason not to do this?

[mcanouil]

@cscheid @jkrumbiegel @MichaelHatherly

[mcanouil]

FYI, there is an ongoing PR to improve the documentation:

• Clarify role of environments in julia engine docs quarto-web#1102

[MichaelHatherly]

Yeah, if there's anything that isn't clearly answered in that PR change then I'm sure @jkrumbiegel can expand the changes there.

[eitsupi]

Oh, thanks.
As it says in that document, it actually seems to work fine without any settings because the runner automatically detects the Julia Project (I guess I was trying different things and missed it)

[dmi3kno]

I came here to say that no other settings, other than

julia:
  exeflags: ["--project=."]

make sense. I don't understand what environment does Quarto use by default. Is there a way that Quarto could be explicit which environment it discovered by using --project=@ heuristic?

[cderv]

Just to clarify some context here:

• Quarto julia engine support is done through QuartoNotebookRunner.jl project : https://github.com/PumasAI/QuartoNotebookRunner.jl
  This dependency is included in Quarto as a specific version to install in a private environment for Quarto. From time to time, the version
  is updated. Our documentation also document how one could use a greater version of this dependency.

• As with other engine, this dependency is responsible for running any Julia computation, and send it back to Quarto for processing. So Quarto does not really set a default --project - QuartoNotebookRunner.jl is doing that.

• They recently change their default: https://github.com/PumasAI/QuartoNotebookRunner.jl/issues/664 and --project=@. is the default (and not --project=@ which is different).

This is quite advanced knowledge how those tools integrated, but I understand how it can be important to understand for anyone developing some Julia tool to be used with Quarto too. We'll try to improve our advanced doc in soon future.

Hope this helps understand.