ATA puts types in $HOME/Microsoft

[Instagit]

• VSCode Version: 1.7.2
• OS Version: Ubuntu 16.04

I have yet to find out how to reproduce this, but VS Code creates a Microsoft/TypeScript/node_modules/ directory with the types-registry npm module in it in the home directory.

The package readme says

This is the source code for the types-publisher service, which publishes the contents of DefinitelyTyped to npm.

I never set anything to be shared or published. So what exactly is this and what does it do?

[Instagit]

Steps to reproduce:

1. open VS Code
2. open any JavaScript file

It only happens for the first JS file that is opened. Could be a bug, too.

[chrmarti]

I guess this is from the automatic typings acquisition in recent versions of TypeScript. @Instagit Are you saying the folder is under ~/Microsoft?

[vladima]

@chrmarti is correct - this is location of global cache for acquired type declarations. These files are downloaded on user machine to power JavaScript intelligence and never uploaded anywhere.

[chrmarti]

@vladima What are the paths that are used for this cache on the different platforms? I think on Linux it might make sense to used a folder name with a leading '.' to hide it from default ls and file explorer behavior - like other tools do. /cc @Tyriar

[Tyriar]

Now that you mention this I have this too. We should absolutely not be putting the types in ~/Microsoft. $XDG_CACHE_HOME/typescript would probably make the most sense, where $XDG_CACHE_HOME defaulting to $HOME/.cache if it is not defined as per the XDG Base Directory Specification. I'm proposing typescript/ instead of microsoft/ to prevent potential future conflicts.

@vladima this is actually quite bad imo, is this a purely upstream problem?

[mjbvz]

This issue was moved to microsoft/TypeScript#12674

[Tyriar]

Let's keep this open on vscode to track it. I'd like to mention the fix in release notes when it comes.

[mjbvz]

This is going into TypeScript 2.2, so we will not be picking it up in VSCode 1.8. You can install a TS 2.2 insiders build to your workspace to work around this for now.