publish-extensions VS open-vsx.org

The biggest caveat would be to be aware of the default connexion to an alternative extension store, https://open-vsx.org, instead of Microsoft's own store, which does not have all the extensions the official store has. But that's less and less an issue, thanks to projects such as https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions. In the worst case, I just manually `git clone`d the desired extension in my local extension folder. Nothing to complain about otherwise

Hey folks, Geoff here from Gitpod. Very please to see there continues to be interest in open (and FOSS) software development tooling. VSCodium uses the OpenVSX registry (which Gitpod folks created) because the VS Market place is proprietary and can only be connected to from offical Visual Studio branded products.

If you can't find an extension when using VSCodium then please send a pull-request to this repository https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions with the identifier and that will help grow the ecosystem of open tooling.

ICMYI - We blogged more about this over at https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch, https://www.gitpod.io/blog/cloud-ide-history and https://www.gitpod.io/blog/open-vsx.

Create a pull request to this repository to have the @open-vsx service account publish the extensions for you. It appears that they run a batch job to keep them up-to-date.

Geoff here from Gitpod. Solid write up and overview here. Some minor clarifications and helpful pointers!

There’s a community WIP pull request open right now to add Gitea support.

The visual studio marketplace is proprietary (by design) and as such we created OpenVSX for the open source ecosystem then gifted it to the eclipse foundation. If you see something not in OpenVSX send the pull request here https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

And, finally, Open source communities are eligible for complimentary plan upgrades to unlimited hours. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-for-opensource

Send a PR to https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

> One goal of Open VSX is to have extension maintainers publish their extensions according to the documentation. However, you may be missing specific extensions that have not been published by their maintainers: either they are not willing to do it, or they haven't found time to do it, or simply they haven't heard about Open VSX yet. Though the preferred solution for such a situation is to convince the maintainers to start publishing themselves, you can add the extensions here to have them published by our CI workflow.

👋🧡 Geoff from Gitpod here. Thanks for your support. OpenVSX was created by Gitpod/TypeFox and gifted to the Eclipse Foundation to resolve the problem that the Visual Studio Marketplace is proprietary. Extensions can be configured to automatically be published via sending a pull-request to https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

The auto-publishing of the extension is failing, due to a misconfiguration of versions in it's package.json.

My third point addresses the FLOSS extensions not yet available on Open VSX. These can usually be added fairly easily via open-vsx/publish-extensions, or by asking the extension author to publish to Open VSX themselves. I believe this mindset is the only way in which FLOSS distributions of VS Code can ever be a viable alternative to Visual Studio Code.

You can follow https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/issues/11080 for news. Publishing to OpenVSX has been implemented on the RA side for 27 days, but it fails because of a server-side problem. https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/pull/1094 (which took 24 days to merge) was supposed to fix it, but it might have been rolled back and I don't think it worked for RA anyway.

looks the warnning would dismiss after this issue approved https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/476

I just wanted to highlight that Open VSX is not an issue, and is not inferior to the Visual Studio Marketplace (as some people are led to believe when they find missing extensions), but rather an awesome project providing a vendor-neutral FLOSS extension registry. The real "issue" to be solved is getting more users and extension authors aboard the train, to fill Open VSX with more extensions and one day make it on-par with the Visual Studio Marketplace. Just the other week, GitHub (a Microsoft owned company!) decided to become a verified publisher on Open VSX, so I have high hopes that we'll get there.