Hacker News Reader

Comment by kimbernator | Hacker News Reader

I used vscodium for a while up until this change was made. The maintainers changes the extension registry to the new one while it had something like 40 total extensions available without any sort of meaningful notification to users, and in a minor version release no less.

Pretty shitty move, IMO. I have trouble trusting maintainers that are willing to push such drastic changes without letting people know.

View on HN

By April 2020, it had roughly 200 extensions because there was no push for marketing it just yet. By the time VSCodium implemented it in June 2022, the push to move extensions over was in the works, and hundreds more were added.

Also have been using VSCodium for years and the transition had no effect on my daily work, despite needing plugins on new machines for the relatively niche language of Elixir.

I'm sure it works fine now, and I don't doubt that it was fine in your case, but it was a huge inconvenience for me and the maintainers were pretty unhelpful about it when people complained. It literally took 9 months for a feature to be added that allowed changing the marketplace a user wanted without it being overwritten by updates.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/418

The correct way to do this would have been to start with a way to persistently change the marketplace URL being used and having the change be opt-in, then having a major version release when the default value was changed, including obvious instructions about how to change the desired marketplace.

Instead, people were told to do the work themselves of porting over the extensions they wanted. That's a great way to get people who don't have the time or interest in that to just abandon the project altogether.

Even if it is fine now, I just don't want a tool I use for my daily work to be one that could break from an auto-update because the maintainers decided to make some massive change without consideration for the users.

That's all fair. My gripe is when people hold much higher standards for FOSS/benevolent projects, when they're usually run by a small team of developers working on their own dime.

Please be more considerate. Sure a very unfortunate decision was made but there's a bunch of people working to offer you and I a true open source alternative to the VSCode ecosystem and I find it excessive and offensive to call that a "pretty shitty move".

the response itself was shitty - there is a non-shitty way to make the decision that was made. People effectively said "hey this is breaking some workflows and I don't have the bandwidth personally to do the work to correct this, can we revert this and figure out a better way?" and the maintainers basically said "bummer dude, maybe you should make time to port extensions."

If my use of curse words is your problem with my comment, fine. But I don't think it's unfair of me to call out a bad decision and a bad handling of the response to that decision when we're talking about a tool that people will do their daily work in.

I wasn't aware of the poor response of the maintainers.

That contextualizes the situation quite clearly and explains the frustration better. Thanks for the explanation.

> true open source alternative to the VSCode

Microsoft made VSCode. Microsoft paid for 99% of its development. Thanks to Microsoft, VSCode has the level of development activity and the sheer volume of changes it has. If Microsoft didn't make VSCode, it would end up just like any other crappy Javascript code editor (like Atom).

It's nice that Microsoft made the code open source. I can respect that. If you want me to respect someone just taking Microsoft's code, repackaging it and cutting off the original extension ecosystem... yea, you'll have a hard time convincing me to do that.

> I find it excessive and offensive

Well I find it excessive and offensive to (from the moral point of view) steal Microsoft's code and make it your own without really adding much (if anything) on your own.

Atom was doing great and I was happy with it until VS code started to create nuclear winter, freezing other efforts.

I will gladly pay a premium for someone to offer me I real VS Code alternative.

Nova almost solves my problems.

> I will gladly pay a premium for someone to offer me I real VS Code alternative.

https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/

Spoiler: telemetry is also on by default

By “steal” do you mean “use in accordance with the license that Microsoft chose”?

That's why I said "morally". The fact that I can take the SQLite code (for example), change a few lines so it's now TotallyNotSQLiteDB, compile it and sell it as my own, without me ever contributing anything back, is not really morally right. The fact that the licence allows such use is a different thing. And you're free to do immoral, but otherwise perfectly legal things. The thing here is that if you're going to do immoral things, people could have have a problem with respecting you or your project. I don't respect people who rebrand open source projects. If you fork a project and add significant work, then that's great and in the spirit of open source (e.g. Electron taking Chromium and Node and making something new and great, Mariadb forking Mysql and going their way with it etc. etc.), but rebrands suck.

I thought you can manually configure VSCodium to use propertiary registry. I have done it before. So this option has been removed?

Upon reviewing the issue surrounding this change on their repository, I can see that an option to persistently change this setting was merged in about 9 months after the change was made. So yes, it is an option now, but at the time the change was made there were only temporary workarounds that would be overwritten whenever an update hit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com