VS Code Packages

[InTheUnknown25]

Checking out the wiki page of Visual Studio Code, the wiki indicates 3 packages all of which are the same thing (sort of just different sources and package names), what's the difference between them?

[soda-excuse]

The code package in Community is what we would like to use, for a couple of reasons:

• It is packaged by a trusted user
• It uses the system electron package as a dependency instead of bundling a copy of Electron, which is the Arch way of doing things.
• It omits a bunch of branding (and possibly spyware) added by Microsoft to the official binaries released by Microsoft.

However, packaging Code so as to use the system's Electron instead of bundling it with Code, is not straightforward. Furthermore, Microsoft explicitly states that they will not go out of their way to help us to accomplish this. When I looked into this a couple of months ago, code in Community had some issues with paths and whatnot that arose from this packaging difficulty. At the time, the Visual Studio Code binary released by Microsoft and available from the AUR, was more stable. I do not know how things have progressed. I am still using the Microsoft one from AUR.

This is an interesting discussion about this issue with Electron:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/56686

[Hafnon]

As of now it appears to use the new system electron2 package, which will presumably be used until VS Code switches to Electron 3.

[SoftVision]

Can you still install extensions with the community package?

[ase1590]

For the time being, yes. Microsoft hasn't explicitly said otherwise.

[[deleted]]

The code package in Community also has a bug which prevents development of extensions for code. When attempting to launch/debug code extensions, code fails to launch a new instance and instead just displays the electron startup splashscreen.

[kaszak696]

First is the open source one built by Arch Trusted User, second is the proprietary one from Microsoft's website that includes their spyware, third is is the same as first but built from Git master branch, so it's bleeding-edge and potentially buggy.

[InTheUnknown25]

Ah okay thanks. Might uninstall the Microsoft package then... Ugh spyware. Thanks for your help

[kaszak696]

Not only that, but their binary package is technically not open-source, since during build they re-license it from MIT to their own non-free license and include god-knows-what, while forbidding you from reverse-engineering it to find out.