Support prereleases

[jakobrosenberg]

I know VSC plugins don't support prereleases, but since it's recommended to use Github releases to handle regression errors, we could also use Github to handle beta releases.

It's very possible that I'm missing an obvious solution to this. 😅

[felipecrs]

Usually, what extensions do to handle this is to have a Preview variant of it. Anyway, I thought on 2 things that needs to be made here:

1. Allow semantic-release-vsce to not publish anything, but just package (so that you can call semantic-release-github to create a GitHub release with the VSIX)
2. Allow semantic-release-vsce to specify custom extension ID depending on the branch (the preview one). I'm not sure yet how it would work.

[felipecrs]

@jakobrosenberg in fact now pre-releases are supported by vsce: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_63#_pre-release-extensions

[felipecrs]

But some work is still required at vsce (and maybe in Visual Studio Marketplace as well). I created an issue there to track: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-vsce/issues/688

[jakobrosenberg]

@felipecrs that's pretty cool! Thanks for the heads up. 😀

[anacierdem]

I think this is in VSCE for some time now: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/publishing-extension#prerelease-extensions

[felipecrs]

Unfortunately not. Their implementation is still misaligned with semver which is what we need. I suggest you weigh in microsoft/vsmarketplace#310.

[anacierdem]

Ah, I misread the issue, I thought this was about providing the --pre-release flag to vsce. I think this is already possible via package.json