Hi all!
It's been 2 years since I forked the original devcontainers-contrib/features repository and brought the features back to life (at least most of them), making devcontainers-extra/features the largest collection of Dev Container features.
It was fun, as I was able to learn a lot, and also I could provide some "value" to others, as a lot of people relied on the features, and making them available again potentially helped them to continue working on their projects and not care about a devcontainer feature to maintain.
However, I find it more and more difficult to, well, find time and energy for working on this project.
Also, I started to have some doubts whether managing the dependencies for your project via Dev Container features is a good idea - from my current perspective, it makes sense to have a set of "core" features, but the actual dependencies you use in your project like Ansible should be managed with something else (uv, mise, directly installing it in your Dev Container's Dockerfile, etc.).
So... I'm not planning to archive the project, but I need to make some decisions to scope it down to make it easier for me to maintain.
That's what I already have in mind:
- Archiving/removing the features that I don't find worth maintaining, so I can focus on the core features - the ones that provide the most value, for example npm-package, apt-packages. Keep in mind that I don't have a final list of features that I consider core ones, or the ones I'm going to archive, it's going to happen on the go, I guess.
- Limiting support only to Debian/Ubuntu based Dev Containers - So if a feature works for other distros (Fedora, Alpine, etc.), that's cool. But if not, I won't care about it.
I think that the archiving process would look more or less like:
- A GitHub Issue would be created to make a "record" of a specific feature being archived.
- The feature would be released with a new version (which would be the last one) with its
devcontainer-feature.json having deprecated property set to true (see schema with properties)
- Then the feature would be moved to archive directory
As the result, the archived features would be still available for you - they won't disappear from GitHub Packages. However, there will be no support from me anymore.
If you care particularly about a specific feature or a set of features, feel free to reach out in the comments. Please be aware though that I may still decide to archive a feature, but I can provide you some support in case you'd like to fork or start maintaining a feature on your own (as long as I find time for that).
As you can read, it's not yet settled how the project will move forward, but I wanted to be open about it, so you can jump in here and comment or just simply be aware about the potential changes here.
I will slowly start taking some actions, for example by closing PRs or issues that are related with non-Debian/Ubuntu problems or fixes.
If you want to make it easier for me to work on this project, you may consider hitting the Sponsor button here. Thanks a lot in advance!
Hi all!
It's been 2 years since I forked the original devcontainers-contrib/features repository and brought the features back to life (at least most of them), making devcontainers-extra/features the largest collection of Dev Container features.
It was fun, as I was able to learn a lot, and also I could provide some "value" to others, as a lot of people relied on the features, and making them available again potentially helped them to continue working on their projects and not care about a devcontainer feature to maintain.
However, I find it more and more difficult to, well, find time and energy for working on this project.
Also, I started to have some doubts whether managing the dependencies for your project via Dev Container features is a good idea - from my current perspective, it makes sense to have a set of "core" features, but the actual dependencies you use in your project like Ansible should be managed with something else (uv, mise, directly installing it in your Dev Container's Dockerfile, etc.).
So... I'm not planning to archive the project, but I need to make some decisions to scope it down to make it easier for me to maintain.
That's what I already have in mind:
I think that the archiving process would look more or less like:
devcontainer-feature.jsonhavingdeprecatedproperty set totrue(see schema with properties)As the result, the archived features would be still available for you - they won't disappear from GitHub Packages. However, there will be no support from me anymore.
If you care particularly about a specific feature or a set of features, feel free to reach out in the comments. Please be aware though that I may still decide to archive a feature, but I can provide you some support in case you'd like to fork or start maintaining a feature on your own (as long as I find time for that).
As you can read, it's not yet settled how the project will move forward, but I wanted to be open about it, so you can jump in here and comment or just simply be aware about the potential changes here.
I will slowly start taking some actions, for example by closing PRs or issues that are related with non-Debian/Ubuntu problems or fixes.
If you want to make it easier for me to work on this project, you may consider hitting the Sponsor button here. Thanks a lot in advance!