There's a few big projects going on under @devcontainers-community:
- The big devcontainers-community/features project and the associated polyrepos
- The devcontainers-community/templates project and associated polyrepos
- The devcontainers-community/npm-features monorepo project for
npm install-able tools - The devcontainers-community/pip-features monorepo project for
pip install-able tools - The various GitHub Action tools
Why some polyrepos and some monorepos?
Because sometimes it's best to isolate components and sometimes it's best to consolidate them. In the case of the vastly different features and associated maintainer knowledge of sometime like a CMake feature vs a Wasmer feature it's helpful to allow those groups to work independently of each other more than a monorepo allows. In reverse, it's helpful for npm-interested people to have all npm-related features under a single roof since it's all within the JavaScript ecosystem. Same for the Python pip features.
Why aren't some of these projects official?
I don't know. Some of them haven't been formally asked to merge to @devcontainers official, while others are just outside the scope of the official specification maintainers. For instance, it's highly unlikely that @devcontainers would take on the devcontainers-community/pip-features project as official, but they might take on some of the popular GitHub Actions. Open a Discussion and chat with them; they seem cool 😎 and won't bite! 😉
How do the polyrepos merge into the big devcontainers-community/features package namespace?
This is a trick where packages like ghcr.io/devcontainers-community/features/*
images can be published from other repositories, not just
devcontainers-community/features. This is what lets us have the source code
in devcontainers-community/features-dart-sdk and publish the feature to
ghcr.io/devcontainers-community/features/dart-sdk. We don't even need a custo
GitHub token to do it!