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Managing Extensions

John Kellerman edited this page Oct 28, 2024 · 2 revisions

Managing Extensions

Deleting an Extension

The service offered at https://open-vsx.org is used by developers around the world to support their daily work. Deleting an extension may break the workflows of several developers.

To delete one or more extension versions, create an issue in EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org naming the extension and which versions you want deleted.

Deleting Selected Versions

When only a subset of the available versions are deleted, the extension remains available. In case an extension with an alias is removed (latest or preview), the alias is automatically reassigned. The latest alias points to the highest version number that is not marked as preview, while preview points to the highest version number that is marked as preview.

Deleting All Versions

When all versions of an extension are deleted, the whole extension with associated metadata (e.g. download count, user ratings) is deleted. That means all requests to the extension id, which consists of the combination of namespace and extension name, will fail. There should be good reasons for doing this.

Extensions can depend on each other in two ways: via extensionDependencies and extensionPack (see Extension Manifest). It is not possible to delete all versions of an extension if there are other extensions that depend on it. Those dependent extensions would need to be deleted first.

Deprecating an Extension

An alternative to deleting an extension is to mark it as deprecated. You can optionally make it not downloadable and/or point to a replacement extension. Deprecated extensions are marked visually in the Open VSX UI.

To deprecate an extension, submit a pull request to extensions.json in openvsx/publish-extensions/extension-control.

Note, the extensions.json file of deprecated extensions is processed by a batch job that runs nightly. So, once your PR is merged, you should see your extension deprecated the next day.

Renaming an Extension

Currently, there is no explicit support to rename an extension. You will need to re-publish it under the new name. Reviews and download statistics will not transfer.

Moving an Extension between Namespaces

Currently, there is no explicit support for moving an extension between namespaces. You can however, rename a namespace and optionally converge it with an existing namespace. This will affect all extensions in the namespace. See Managing Namespaces

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