Use official features to assemble official devcontainers

[mering]

In order to reduce maintenance and increase the number of users of devcontainer features (from https://github.com/devcontainers/features and https://github.com/devcontainers-contrib/features) it would be great if the provided official images would the base image with a set of features added on top. If some features are missing (like C++), add them.

[joshspicer]

Hey @mering! Many of our images do utilize Features (one example) where it makes sense. All of the images in this repo are built with the dev container CLI and the source of truth for the images is the associated devcontainer.json.

Let me know if i'm missing some nuance to your question, but I believe we're already employing your suggestion :)

[mering]

I would like to assemble a dev container for C++ and Python. While there is a great Python feature which is also used in the Python image, there is none for C++ and the C++ image is installing them manually in the Dockerfile. Same manual installation in the universal image.

[bamurtaugh]

Thanks for opening @mering!

We seek to keep the set of images and features we host in the dev containers org relatively slim, to avoid too heavy a maintenance burden, and this way the experts in various languages or toolsets have greater ownership over them and can update them more freely!

As it sounds like this is a request for additional features in the dev containers org, I don't anticipate us taking on many more here.

Please let us know if you have other questions, and thanks for your feedback and thoughts!

[mering]

to avoid too heavy a maintenance burden

This is exactly why I am proposing this: Instead of having to maintain the same C++ toolchain in multiple images, it would be maintained in only one feature owned by the experts in the C++ language.

[mering]

FYI: there are now community features for CMake, LLVM and vcpkg.