Support for deprecated extensions in the marketplace about vsmarketplace HOT 14 OPEN

The irony is that if you search for ansible the first result listed will be microsoft own retired ansible extension, which is still listed first despite having added a “retired” inside description and being unmaintained.

The reality is the marketplace is full of zombies and nothing is done to clean it up. The entire value of the marketplace is diluted because there is no way to hide/archive extensions.

I will repeat it: too much junk does lower the overall experience for all users, it does not bring any real value.

I even tried using the report option to report unmaintained extensions that used dependencies with critical security issues but apparently the process is very slow and most of the time it has no results at all.

Adding a filter that removes any extension that contains retired keyword in title or description from search could be seen as an easy to implement solution that does not require UI development. Just do that and it should be enough for start, lots of people used that approach already.

In fact the implicit filter could also be implemented in the two most important clients: web fronted and the vscode own marketplace search (so api itself would still return them).

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My 2 cents: Deprecation and Hiding extensions are 2 different things. Deprecation can mean that a specific extension is deprecated because it's no longer being maintained, or it may have some critical issues. The experience to deprecate extension could have a way to specify (may be by default but can be opted out) that it should be hidden as well.
Suggested add-ons to deprecation functionality:

• Capability to recommend another extension as an alternative.
• Transfer popularity to the recommended alternative extension. This helps with adoption of the alternative by moving it up the ladder on search results.

Check out equivalent experiences for NuGet packages:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/deprecate-packages
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/deprecate-packages#transfer-popularity-to-a-newer-package

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Please file issue against Marketplace. @gaurav42 FYI

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Yes it is.

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Apart from this the extensions would need to have a deprecated flag. So that VS Code can also render them in a custom way.

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Even if extra metadata is added for deprecation, asking extension developer to re-publish it can prove a real problem. Many may no longer bother to do it as it requires extra work, is not like putting a checkmark on a web form. Many extensions are abandonware, so you cannot even contact original publisher.

This is why earlier this month I released Octarine for vscode -- which is an extension that only prompts you to uninstall known problematic extensions. The list is manually picked. Feel free to add a pull-request to it.

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@sandy081 Any hints about your last recommendation? My impression was that this was the place to raise bugs for marketplace.

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Hi @sandy081 , any chance see a change on this? It could be a really usefull feature.

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@prashantvc I think this request makes overall sense: some way for extensions to say they are deprecated. Assigning to backlog and we should tackle some time in the future.

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This feature should allow extension to specify that it is deprecated in favour of another extension - so that VS Code can ask user to install the other extension.

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This feature should also allow extensions to specify they are archived - which means no more updates, still working but looking for maintainers.

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@anangaur thanks for jumping in. Yeah I really like the NuGet flow here. We need to build the same thing for the Marketplace.

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So we do have issues marked as duplicate for this which are about showing the deprecation. microsoft/vscode-discussions#1 also references this issue, because while there is now a way to deprecate an extension and even setup a replecment recommendation, the marketplace still does not show either of those.
@isidorn Shouldn't the deprecation "discussion" should be moved to this repo as it actually only applies to the marketplace (which only handles the deprecation via API but not via webinterface, if I understood it correctly), not to vscode itself?

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I think you are right that the discussion belongs here. However since we originally wrongly put it in vscode-discussions I would leave it there (especially since we have some links from our Docs page that point to it).

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