Integrate with open-vsx.org

[felipecrs]

Hi,

Open VSX was just released and it is a open source registry for VS Code extensions, just like Visual Studio Marketplace.

It may be a good idea to use and support Open VSX instead of creating yet another one, since the extension developers will have more places to publish.

It's just an idea.

https://open-vsx.org/
https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx

[nhooyr]

We are reviewing this internally.

[kylecarbs]

After internalizing this, we've decided to not do this.

We'll likely document our registry more-heavily in the future. For now, if we switched over we'd lose a lot of extension support.

[felipecrs]

It's perfectly understandable from a company's point of view.

However, for consumers (developers in general) of code-server (or any other "distribution" of VS Code other than Microsoft), a single registry for vsix would be good because it would have a better chance that an extension is there and also updated. And mainly for the extension developers, because they would not have to push to different places, which is hard to maintain.

The ideal world would be to see you guys working together with @TypeFox (a company that has been working in openvsx) in favor of a single and greatest vsix registry.

But this is just my thoughts. I hope both registries to grow so 😎.

[nhooyr]

@meysholdt Hello Moritz!

Congrats on openvsx. How many extensions do you guys have in total on there in comparison with the VS Code marketplace?

[meysholdt]

Hi @nhooyr, thank you!

I'll forward that question to @spoenemann, who is leading the OpenVSX project at TypeFox.

[spoenemann]

The registry is still in testing / "beta" status and we are in the process of transferring open-vsx.org to the Eclipse Foundation (the source code is already an Eclipse Foundation project, but the public deployment is currently operated by TypeFox). I hope we'll get this transfer done within a few weeks.

You can now see the number of extensions below the search field (194). That's of course very little compared to the Microsoft Marketplace (17582), but that's also because we haven't put any work in promoting the registry yet (apart from an Eclipse Newsletter article).

[nhooyr]

You can now see the number of extensions below the search field (194). That's of course very little compared to the Microsoft Marketplace (17582), but that's also because we haven't put any work in promoting the registry yet (apart from an Eclipse Newsletter article).

That's a showstopper for us. What do you think of using our registry which is presently at 4184 extensions? We'd be happy to open source and donate it. It's written in Go and runs on kubernetes. It scrapes a manually collected list of GitHub repositories on which extensions are hosted but also allows submitting VSIXes manually.

We just don't have a public frontend for it to submit extensions yet #1299

[mahmoudajawad]

Yes! do it! That would be great for the FOSS community and for both the teams.

[nhooyr]

Hi @spoenemann, any update on my proposal? It's best for the community that we work together on this rather than apart.

[felipecrs]

I see conceptual divergences in the two.

code-server registry searches the internet for .vsix files, this way, extension developers have to do nothing. It's good it already has so many extensions.

openvsx aims to be a full replacement for VS Marketplace, which even provides a CLI for publishing extensions, so developers have to publish in both VS Marketplace and OpenVSX. And that's not a problem: Marketplace for VS Code users and OpenVSX for everything else. With time, it can become a standard for extension developers.

A mix between the two concepts sounds interesting: I don't know if Microsoft will publish their own extensions in OpenVSX on their own, then the code-server approach is a fallback.

[nhooyr]

@felipecassiors That's besides the point. Ideally we have a single open source extension marketplace otherwise we're going to end up competing with each other. As of now, we have dramatically more extensions thanks to our approach. We can merge the two thoughtfully if we work together.