Visual Studio Code disabled: website moved to client-side javascript only

[overbid]

Today when I ran umake ide visual-studio-code
I got ERROR: Download page changed its syntax or is not parsable

[didrocks]

Hey @overbid and thanks for reporting this bug!

Indeed, it seems that Microsoft changed the website overnight, hence you are getting this error. After looking at it for a little bit, I'm afraid I can't get a fix quickly for this: they moved to a pure client-side javascript that we can't handle for now and don't have good hooks for fixed urls as other ones.

For now (and this release), I just disabled the framework so that it's not offered as a choice as a band-aid solution. I'm retitling this bug report for making it clearer what the issue is.

You can only download and install it manually as such, for the time being, I'm afraid.

[tbroyer]

It looks like the links can be found in https://code.visualstudio.com/scripts/download.js; though there are 2 such links for each platform ("insiders" and "preview") and it would be hard to pick the right one in a forward-compatible way without actually running the script.
Let's hope they sort it out when exiting "beta".

BTW, did you get in touch with Microsoft about this?

[didrocks]

I did send an email when we provided the first support version, but didn't get any answer. If you have any contact, I'll be really interested :)

Yeah, I agree with your that parsing the script would be a fallback, but I'm afraid as well of a forward-compatible to ensure this doesn't break again.

[hoovercj]

@tbroyer: I saw your tweet. The team is very responsive to issues created on their repository so you might log something there: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues

[LyzardKing]

I had a look as well. If we can consider the downloads.js file stable we
can use that. But it seems to me that it has only developer
versions(preview and insiders). Or am I wrong?
The tar file that you download from the website
(https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/?dv=linux64) is missing.

On 09/02/2016 11:35, Cody Hoover wrote:

@tbroyer https://github.com/tbroyer: I saw your tweet. The team is
very responsive to issues created on their repository so you might log
something there: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#247 (comment).

[tbroyer]

@LyzardKing the dv=linux64 triggers the download code from download.js, which will use the "preview" link ("insiders" link is used in the presence of an additional build parameter in the query-string)

@hoovercj Thought about it, but they made it clear on one issue that the "VS Code" product you download from code.visualstudio.com is not the same (not even the same license) as the vscode project (even though they use the same source code); so vscode is about the OSS project, and not directly related to the "product" from Microsoft (several issues about, e.g. "cannot install extensions when building from source" have been closed and link to that issue comment).
Specifically, see microsoft/vscode#1230 and microsoft/vscode#60 (comment)
As a Microsoftee (or soon to become one), do you think we should use that channel then?
(thanks for chiming in btw)

[hoovercj]

@tbroyer Regarding #1230, they did end up making https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/Previous-Releases.

They've been really responsive on both twitter and github, but I've been following their behavior pretty closely and it seems that they prefer to open issues about almost anything so it can be triaged and followed up on. If you're hoping to get a concrete answer from them I'd open an issue.

[didrocks]

@hoovercj Excellent! Thanks for the head's up. Do you think we should use that page as a stable (at least more stable) way to download existing versions?

Great to see that they are speeding up the responsivness and engagement with the community! :)

[tbroyer]

@didrocks Latest version is 0.10.8 (released a few days ago), and the page has just been updated (few hours ago) to include 0.10.6; so unfortunately no umake shouldn't use it.

[tbroyer]

Hey, just stumbled on microsoft/vscode#1084 (linked from 1230 actually): they do have permalinks (those from the download.js a priori) so actually umake doesn't even need to scrape any web page!

[didrocks]

Excellent finding @tbroyer!

Going to use this then (will work on that this evening or early afternoon if nobody beats me to it ;))

[LyzardKing]

I tried with the links hardcoded (we can do that if they're permalinks, right?).
Another thing that is wrong is the icon (now called code.png instead of vscode.png)

[hoovercj]

@tbroyer awesome find, I hope that works for you guys.

[didrocks]

@LyzardKing: I think download_link should be the license, and then, we can use the traditional parser hook to always return true with the hardcoded links (as static urls) based on arch. If you want, I can give a quick commit to it, you review and modify tests, that works for you?

[LyzardKing]

Sound good! :)

[didrocks]

@LyzardKing: here are the commit swhich should bring that support, do you have time having a look at adapting (and reenabling the tests then?) I guess we can remove (as we are using now baseinstaller now) the additional tests in the medium test and just use traditional inheritance (but with multiple servers this time).

Tell me if you need any help! :)

[didrocks]

(and ensure you branch from https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-make/tree/vsc-fix) ;)

[LyzardKing]

Looks good! Simple and clean. I'll have a look at the tests

[LyzardKing]

The tests work. I linked the second commit, but the ide tests should be there as well.

[didrocks]

Just released 16.02.1 with that fix! Thanks again to everyone involved in the discussion :)