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Question / Improvement: Incremental publishing of devcontainer features and `devcontainer-collection.json`

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
typescript
Domain
cli

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by reproducing incremental and all-at-once feature publishing, then trace how devcontainer-collection.json is generated; define whether incremental publishing is supported, how entries should be merged, or what documentation should state.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Description

We’re exploring whether the Dev Container CLI is intended to support publishing devcontainer features one by one.

When features are published individually, devcontainer-collection.json is regenerated each time and ends up containing only the last published feature. When all features are published together, the collection file is generated correctly.

This behavior seems consistent and intentional, so this is not a bug report, more a question and possible improvement discussion.


Question / Improvement Idea

Is publishing features incrementally an intended workflow?

If this use case is in scope, would it make sense to support:

  • Merging newly published features into an existing devcontainer-collection.json, or
  • A flag or documented approach for incremental publishing?

The motivation is mainly CI/CD robustness, where publishing one feature should not block others.


If incremental publishing is intentionally unsupported, clarification or documentation around this would also be very helpful.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
5

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