Updates on vscode-arduino

[benmcmorran]

Maintainer activity on this project has been quiet, and some of you awesome users and contributors have rightfully questioned the direction of this project. I’m excited to announce that we’re making some changes to give this project the attention it deserves. Going forward:

• New PRs and issues will be reviewed at least weekly by members of the C++ Embedded Team in DevDiv at Microsoft. That team consists of myself (@benmcmorran), @aleun, @gcampbell-msft, @fearthecowboy, @itodirel, and @robotdad. We’re the same folks that are working on other embedded tooling in Visual Studio and VS Code.
• Existing PRs will be driven to completion, either by closing or working with the contributor to merge the changes. We plan to have this work done within about two months.
• Existing issues will be triaged within three months. We don’t have a firm timeline for resolving all issues but expect to see some activity happening on an ongoing basis.
• On Wednesday, January 12 the master and dev branches will be renamed, and the default branch will change. Existing PRs will be retargeted to the new branch names. These changes will make opening a PR simpler and make this project more inclusive.
  • master will be renamed to release. The tip of this branch will continue to point at the latest release or release candidate.
  • dev will be renamed to main. This branch will continue to be the branch that contributors should target.
  • The default branch will be changed to main.

You may also see other work happening from our team. We will try to ensure this work has minimal to no impact on external contributors, but for reference:

• CI will be split across GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines. The GitHub Actions script will only do cross-platform build and test and is designed to provide quick feedback to external contributors. The Azure Pipelines script will run on an internal Microsoft pool and includes additional compliance steps like signing and security scanning. External contributors won’t be able to access logs from Azure Pipelines, but the build steps are nearly identical to GitHub Actions. Any CI failures that are exclusive to Azure Pipelines will be investigated by our team.
• Features that are broadly useful to embedded developers may be moved to their own VS Code extensions. For example, serial monitoring is useful in many embedded scenarios outside of Arduino. If we extract any features, we’ll ensure that the Arduino extension continues to work with the new extension and installs it automatically.

Finally, huge thanks to all of you for using and contributing to this project and helping keep it alive! If you have any questions or suggestions about this project’s governance, please let us know.

[benmcmorran]

Branches have been renamed and CI is updated #1413. Please refer to these instructions if you have local branches that need to be renamed.