"dist" folder in .gitignore

[danielbasso]

Silly question, but why the dist folder is in .gitignore? I've launched the Extension Development Host and tried to View() some data frames, only to see a blank output. After some fiddling, I've realized that the .css files need to render the table were missing from the repository:

After copying and pasting the files from the actual extension, everything came back to normal:

No big deal, I'm just curious.

[renkun-ken]

You are right. The current build task does not populate dist folder created from the webpack config.

@ManuelHentschel Do you have any idea how we could fix this?

[ManuelHentschel]

Currently we have two sets of build tasks:

1. The ones you see in package.json and use during development. These are fast to compile and easy to debug.
2. The ones used for deployment, in the package.json under "withWebpack". These use webpack and produce a smaller .vsix, but are significantly slower to compile and debug.

You can switch to the deployment build by running node .github/scripts/enableWebpack.js and back by resetting the git repo (so don't do this with uncommited changes). The dist folder is where the deployment tasks produce their output, so it is still in the .gitignore and is not intended to be used for other files.

Fyi this is where webpack is enabled in one of the Github actions:

vscode-R/.github/workflows/main.yml

Line 28 in 89e9633

- run: node $SCRIPT_DIR/enableWebpack.js

Let me know if there are any issues with this setup!

[renkun-ken]

I'm curious if there is an easier or smarter way to do this? If the dist needs to be updated, then the build task should update it anyway.

[ManuelHentschel]

Just to be clear, what is the problem we would solve here? If I'm not mistaken, the only limitation caused by this setup is that a folder named dist cannot be used. If we used webpack permanently (or both build systems), the dist folder would still be populated by webpack and should not be used for other files.

[renkun-ken]

I'm no NodeJS expert, and I'm even not sure if I use dist in the proper way. I just need certain paths to those js/css files at runtime to be put in the WebViews.

[ManuelHentschel]

The files used by the plot and help webviews are currently in the 'html' subfolder. Those are included in the final vsix and can be accessed by their expected relative paths. Only the "main" ts/js files (including node modules) are optimised by webpack and put in the dist folder.

My personal recommendation would be to do the same for other webviews (if they don't need any node modules etc).