Python extension should activate on onDebugInitialConfigurations

Hi VS Code dev here 👋

1. Have python extension installed, workspace without a launch.json.
2. Do not open a python file
3. Press “Open launch.json” in the Debug viewlet
4. Python options are not presented 🐛

The issue for this is because Python extension did not get activated since no python file got opened. I suggest that python extension gets activated also for onDebugInitialConfigurations event. This event is fired when the launch.json is about to get populated for the first time.

fyi @luabud

[isidorn]

@dantup please create an issue in vscode and we can continue the discussion there. Also this event will only be fired the very first time the launch.json is getting created. It will not be fired every time a user wants to debug.

[DanTup]

the event @DanTup is describing is a corner case

I think it’s more than that. It’s pretty common to open a project and (with no files open) just hit F5. The more languages that do this, the more options the user has to read through to figure out what they need to select 😞

It also means that the extension will almost always be activated (anytime someone wants to debug any type of project your extension will now be activated). The C# extension does this and I’m frequently seeing it start downloading SDK/dependencies when I’m starting to debug a Dart project.

I appreciate this is the wrong issue tracker for it, but I think VS Code really needs better APIs here. In addition to the bad UX, there’s a perf implication - the more languages that subscribe to this, the slower pressing F5 will be as a bunch of extensions all start running activating code (and potentially spawning language servers, etc).