Drop support for variable substition for program and runtime in package.json

[isidorn]

Stop supporting variable substitution (e.g. ${workspaceRoot}) inside the package.json runtime and program fields.

Affected are exactly these two attributes in the debuggers contribution:

We have never marketed this feature and now it is providing some debt when introducing multi root workspaces (as the package.json can not specify against which root to resolve the variables against)

[weinand]

Please see "Variable substitution in package.json will no longer be supported" in the upcoming July release notes.

Namedrops:
@DanTup @DonJayamanne @MSLaguana @WebFreak001 @andysterland @daviwil @delmyers @devoncarew @felixfbecker @gregg-miskelly @hbenl @lukaszunity @ramya-rao-a @rebornix @rkeithhill @roblourens @svaarala @vadimcn

[WebFreak001]

Did you mean the debug launch.json or the actual extension package.json? If it's the launch.json, is "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}" still supported? There isn't really a solution to change the cwd to if you want to commit the debug file to a project if that variable gets removed from cwd.

[weinand]

@WebFreak001 as the titles says, I only mean variable substitution in the "package.json" of a debugger extension. So this planned feature drop only affects debug extension authors, not end users.

[DonJayamanne]

Phew.
Thanks for the clarification @weinand . Almost started panicking here.

[DanTup]

@weinand I'm slightly confused by what's being dropped. I do have some instances of ${workspaceRoot} in my packages.json however I believe that all of them are just written into the launch.json literally, so no substitution is done.

Two of them (configurationAttributes/launch/properties/program/default here and initialConfigurations/program here) appear as the string ${workspaceRoot} and the other (configurationSnippets/bodyprogram here) is written as "^\"\\${workspaceRoot}/bin/main.dart\"".

Would I be right in assuming that none of this would be affected, but after the change maybe the last one would not need the escaping?

Thanks!

[weinand]

@DanTup yes, variable substitution in the package.json does not affect your contributions (and you can verify this easily because the generated launch.json should contain the ${workspaceRoot} variable literally).
The escaping for the snippets is needed because of the snippet syntax, not to prevent the variable substitution. Variable substitution only occurs for the program and runtime attributes of a debuggers contribution:

[DanTup]

@weinand Gotcha! Thanks!