Changing non-root user name from 'vscode' to something more general

[devcontainers]

Changing non-root user name from 'vscode' to something more general

[samruddhikhandale]

Hi @natescherer 👋

Yes, we had a discussion about renaming the vscode user when we were in the process of migration. We intentionally didn't change then as migration itself was a big change, and we didn't want to confuse folks. However, I believe we could soon pick this up. // cc @Chuxel / @bamurtaugh @devcontainers/maintainers

Unfortunately, I don't have an issue of hand for the discussion, we could now use this one for tracking the re-naming. Thanks!

While I recognize it would probably be a fairly major breaking change, I feel like it would be the right move going forward.

Yes, I agree 💯 . We had discussed some remedies to contain the problems associated with this change. ( eg. bumping major versions, adding back compatibility/ error handling with prominent messaging). We'd have a concrete plan once someone picks this up.

[Chuxel]

Yes, the only reason it hasn't been done is due to the breaking change for existing image users. We'd need to figure out how to manage that problem.

[jkeech]

To summarize an offline discussion we had about this issue:

• We do want to change the user for the images from vscode to something generic, like devcontainer
• We need to plan how to do it carefully since it is a breaking change, and we want to minimize the impact to repos with existing devcontainer configurations that use the vscode user
• It will be a major version bump on the images, but we also want to see if there's a way to more gracefully roll out this change
• One thing that's related which we can do is to improve the error messaging if the specified remoteUser does not exist in the container image. Today users get hard-to-intepret error messages when there's a mismatch. If we change the user in the container and users still have "remoteUser":"vscode", we'd want to at least have a clear error message.

[natescherer]

All sounds good to me.

Major version bump should insulate anyone who's using semver properly but I'll freely admit to lazily using the latest tag too often, ha.

Perhaps in advance of the change you could have the containers spit out warning messages similar to how Azure CLI does in advance of major breaking changes?

[hoechenberger]

Hello, I wanted to ask if any progress has been made on this issue since last year? :) Thank you!