Publish AmazonWebServices.amazon-q-vscode to Open VSX

[corvuslee]

Dear extension author,
The publishing workflow used to work (#1355) but now it's breaking as you're releasing both AmazonWebServices.amazon-q-vscode and AmazonWebServices.aws-toolkit-vscode in the same repo. Please consider pushing to the Open VSX marketplace instead of asking them to pull from your vsix files.

Context

Unfortunately, as Microsoft prohibits usages of the Microsoft marketplace by any other products or redistribution of .vsix files from it, in order to use VS Code extensions in non-Microsoft products, we kindly ask that you take ownership of the VS Code extension namespace in Open VSX and publish this extension on Open VSX.

What is Open VSX? Why does it exist?

Open VSX is a vendor neutral alternative to the MS marketplace used by most other derivatives of VS Code like VSCodium, Gitpod, OpenVSCode, Theia-based IDEs, and so on.

You can read on about Open VSX at the Eclipse Foundation's Open VSX FAQ.

How can you publish to Open VSX?

The docs to publish an extension can be found here. This process is straightforward and shouldn't take too long. Essentially, you need an authentication token and to execute the ovsx publish command to publish your extension. There's also a doc explaining the whole process with an example GitHub Action workflow.

[justinmk3]

Thanks for raising this.

The publishing workflow used to work (#1355) but now it's breaking as you're releasing both AmazonWebServices.amazon-q-vscode and AmazonWebServices.aws-toolkit-vscode in the same repo.

That's unfortunate. We publish each vsix artifact to different tags, e.g.:

• https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-vscode/releases/tag/amazonq%2Fv1.2.0
• https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-vscode/releases/tag/toolkit%2Fv3.2.0

does that help?

[corvuslee]

The current pull workflow apparently fetches vsix file from latest tag only. Instead of patching the pull workflow, I think the ultimate fix is to push to Open VSX from here. There are AWS services such as the code editor in SageMaker Studio using this extension on Open VSX.

[justinmk3]

Oh, I misunderstood something: it looks like AWS Toolkit is still being pulled: https://open-vsx.org/extension/amazonwebservices/aws-toolkit-vscode/changes

So this doesn't necessarily "break" anything, but we do need to think about how to publish Amazon Q.

[corvuslee]

Actually toolkit failed in the past few days/week until 3.2.0 was tagged as latest yesterday.

[justinmk3]

Workaround

As a workaround, you can install the Amazon Q extension directly from our published downloads. The vsix file(s) provided there are identical to what we would publish to OpenVSX.

How to install

1. Download Amazon Q (amazon-q-vscode*.vsix) or AWS Toolkit (aws-toolkit-vscode*.vsix) from https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-vscode/releases
2. Run Extensions: Install from VSIX... from the VSCode command palette and choose the vsix file(s).

[justinmk3]

Amazon Q and AWS Toolkit are now published to Open VSX: https://open-vsx.org/namespace/amazonwebservices