feature-request: stable download urls for tagged versions

[vince-fugnitto]

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Feature Request

As an application developer, the ability to have fixed or stable download urls for a given extension would be useful. For instance, Theia-based applications can compose their application with a set of "built-in" extensions (extensions that should be bundled by default by their product), and being able to specify a fixed url for downloading such extensions (ex: latest version), would help in maintenance and testing efforts.

A more practical use-case, is to use such urls when actually developing the framework without the need to constantly update the version defined in the package.json:

• https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/blob/31d47498d52af4bfc129df2cba16e49363e819b7/package.json#L85-L87

Currently, there is support for obtaining information for a given latest version of an extension (ex: https://open-vsx.org/api/redhat/java/latest), but the idea would be to also have a fixed link to directly download the .vsix.

Idea

The idea would be to have fixed urls for tagged versions such as (which application can then use directly):

• latest
• preview

Motivation

• https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/7712#issuecomment-628967408
• https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx/issues/46#issuecomment-604850766

Is this something the project finds useful to support?

[spoenemann]

Yes we could add that. I could imagine supporting file aliases like download, manifest, license etc.

Example: /api/redhat/java/latest/file/download

[amvanbaren]

I'm closing this issue, because it's a duplicate of #507.