Publish the extension to Open VSX about vscode-hack

[fredemmott]

AIUI Forks of VS Code are not able to use it; https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch was initially a major reason, though microsoft open-sourced their implementation shortly after (microsoft/vscode@822f995)

[PranayAgarwal]

This is now working again! See https://github.com/slackhq/vscode-hack/releases/tag/v2.13.0, which was published automatically.

[PranayAgarwal]

Once upon a time we did publish the compiled VSIX as part of the Github release, but that build pipeline got messed up at some point. I can try and add a Github Action to enable that again, which should make this use case a lot smoother at least.

For the full ask, we'll need to get the registry (https://open-vsx.org/) and its publisher agreement looked at and approved. No promises or timeline to share on that from my side.

[filiptronicek]

Happy to report all went well and pranayagarwal.vscode-hack is published to open-vsx.org 🎉

• https://open-vsx.org/extension/pranayagarwal/vscode-hack
• open-vsx/publish-extensions@450dc34

cc @PranayAgarwal @cooperbenson-qz

[muglug]

What Microsoft licensing restrictions are preventing you from using exensions through the official VS Code store?

[cooperbenson-qz]

Exactly. In fact, GitPod is the exact reason we're looking into this. For the short term, we can probably just build a .vsix and host it on a publicly available URL, but long term it would be great if we could get official binaries and updates via Open VSX.

[cooperbenson-qz]

Yeah if you could add the .vsix as a release artifact that would be amazing!

[filiptronicek]

Hey there everyone, since it seems a lot of users (including a lot of our users using Gitpod) use the extension, I would like to propose that the extension gets automatically published via the special repository Open VSX has setup for publishing third-party extensions, https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions/ - although this should be only considered temporary before Slack can figure the legal side of it out 🙏.

If nobody from Slack has anything against it, I will add it to the repo.

cc @PranayAgarwal @muglug

[PranayAgarwal]

Hey @filiptronicek, I can't say if we will be able to take over ownership of the listing page on https://open-vsx.org/, but I also don't see any problems (legal or otherwise) with this above approach being the permanent one, as long as it meets the terms of the MIT license.

[filiptronicek]

If it wouldn't be possible for Slack to take over ownership, that's no problem as well. We try to have as few extensions as possible on https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions/ (hard to maintain publishing of ~400 extensions), but the fact that .vsix files are published as Release asset here [1] makes it a lot easier for our script to publish it.

I will try to publish the extension now and come back with the results.