Does the "platform" key mean anything?

[jcbhmr]

unsure if this is the right spot to ask

https://github.com/devcontainers/templates/blob/main/src/java/devcontainer-template.json#L37

I see that sometimes it's "Any", and sometimes it's a tool or library, and sometimes it's a programming language?

All that's said in the docs is:

Basically, what I'm getting at is: do these keywords do anything in this example devcontainer-template.json file?

{
	"id": "jupyter-datascience-notebooks",
	"version": "1.0.0",
	"name": "Jupyter Data Science Notebooks",
	"description": "Use Jupyter Data Science Notebooks with Python, R, Julia, and more.",
	"documentationURL": "https://github.com/devcontainers-community/templates/tree/main/src/jupyter-datascience-notebooks",
	"publisher": "Community",
	"licenseURL": "https://github.com/devcontainers-community/templates/blob/main/LICENSE",
	"options": {
		"baseVariant": {
			"type": "string",
			"description": "Base image. Check the documentation for details.",
			"default": "datascience-notebook",
			"proposals": [
				"base-notebook",
				"minimal-notebook",
				"r-notebook",
				"scipy-notebook",
				"tensorflow-notebook",
				"datascience-notebook",
				"pyspark-notebook",
				"all-spark-notebook"
			]
		},
		"imageVariant": {
			"type": "string",
			"description": "Image version (tag).",
			"default": "latest",
			"proposals": ["latest"]
		}
	},
	"platforms": [
		"Python",
		"R",
		"Julia",
		"numpy",
		"pandas",
		"tidyverse",
		"much more"
	]
}

especially that "much more" 😆

[samruddhikhandale]

Hi 👋

Thanks for raising this question. When templates were located in microsoft/vscode-dev-containers, the platforms variable was used for the auto-generated README files.

Example 👇

Looks like we did migrate the variable so that it could be utilized for auto-generated docs, however, it seems to have slipped though the gaps - I'll update devcontainers/action to utilize it. Wondering, @jcbhmr would that be helpful?

Also, in future this variable could be further utilized by the https://containers.dev/templates website as well for categorizing Templates.

// cc @joshspicer / @bamurtaugh wondering if you're aware of any current use case of platforms variable that I might be missing.

[joshspicer]

Those properties don't do anything today in the CLI, they seem to have been included in the initial spec as metadata for docs, etc.

That said, we have a spec proposal related to this currently on our backlog. The spec issue is for Features, but anything we did there would likely translate to Templates as well. devcontainers/spec#58

[bamurtaugh]

Thanks for opening @jcbhmr, and thanks for looping me in @samruddhikhandale!

@chrmarti do we use "platform" at all in VS Code tooling?

[jcbhmr]

Looks like we did migrate the variable so that it could be utilized for auto-generated docs, however, it seems to have slipped though the gaps - I'll update devcontainers/action to utilize it. Wondering, @jcbhmr would that be helpful?

Sure! I was wondering in my original question if it was used for something like "only for x86 machines" or "only for Windows" or something more hard-and-fast. It appears from this discussion that its more cosmetic than programmatic though. That answers my question! 👍