Allow extensions to publish beta releases and users to opt-in to them
isidorn opened this issue · 4 comments
Originally by @DanTup in microsoft/vscode#15756
"Apologies if this has come up before; I'm unable to find any related issues.
It would be cool to be able to publish extensions in a beta form (similar to Code Insiders) so that they can be run "in production" with real users that have opted-in. This would reduce the disk in publishing an extension because you can push it to a smaller number of users for testing (I probably don't need to sell this to you, I guess you have Insiders for very similar reasons).
I know we can package and distribute extensions ourselves for now, but it's not as easy (eg. updating is not automatic).
I originally thought the "Preview" flag might've provided this functionality but unless I've overlooked something, it does not seem to."
From @isidorn
Due to the lack of this feature a lot of extensions are publishing two versions: a regular one and a beta one and this is very confusing to the user because:
- These beta extensions do not have consistent naming:
beta,nightly,insiders - The beta extensions have special settings flags that need to be turned on in order for this to work
- Running extensions side by side is a problem
We need a consistent experience.
fyi @alexr00 @connor4312 @eamodio @jrieken as some team members that I know have these insiders extensions and probably know a lot more issues about this.
@prashantvc I have assigned this to the Backlog for now, feel free to move to planned when if you think it makes sense.
FYI, our C/C++ extension created its own Insider mechanism (opt-in via the C_Cpp.updateChannel setting, with .vsix publishing done via GitHub Release assets), but we found that usage wasn't high enough unless we made it be the default for VS Code Insiders users, and we also added a 1 time opt-in prompt for VS Code (non-Insiders) users. We've been using it with good results since 2018. Switching to a marketplace version would be preferred, but only if it doesn't make our Insider usage "too low".
This is now supported by VS Code. Marketplace still has to support full SemVer for which I believe there is another issue (if not I know @prashantvc has this on the backlog)