Track requirements.txt

[gshotwell]

A common problem that I see a lot (especially with deploying to Posit Connect), is that user requirements.txt files are too extensive. They're often generated with pip freeze which locks down a lot of unnecessary dependencies and sometimes makes them impossible to resolve on another operating system. It would be nice if positron had a package installer which also managed a requirements.txt file. How this would work is that the installer would only write the top level packages and their versions to requirements.txt when they were installed. This would keep the file clean and give Connect a better chance at resolving the environment.

[juliasilge]

Thanks for sharing this, especially regarding that common pain point! We have some ideas for "next level" environment management in #1391 and I'll add a link there to this idea.