Official recommendation of registering redhat.telemetry.enabled is against vscode official practices

[ssbarnea]

It appears that only one extension is allowed to contribute a specific configuration property, such redhat.telemetry.enabled.

If user has more than one extension that tries to do this, it will popup a runtime warning message like below that complains about it:

AFAIK, the only solution known is not to register it and eventually use separate unique settings. The funny aspect is that we already have at least 3 extensions registering the same property:

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.vscode-yaml
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.ansible
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.vscode-commons -- which to me looks like an unmaintained attempt to isolate this feature in a separate extension. Last update was many years ago.

What should we do to address this?

References

• Redhat Telemetry Enabled and unchecked in Settings microsoft/vscode#226525
• cannot register 'redhat.telemetry.enabled'. this property is already registered vscode-yaml#1044
• Extension issue ""Cannot register 'redhat.telemetry.enabled'. This property is already registered." vscode-yaml#564

[fbricon]

the idea behind that unique setting is that we don't want users to have to deal with the Red Hat telemetry opt-in request for every single Red Hat extension. A single centralized setting does it. In order to register it once, we initially had a dedicated extension, vscode-commons, which would simply own that setting, but we got so much flak we had to move away from it, towards that duplicate setting across all Red Hat extensions.
My experience with the duplicate settings is the warning popup only shows when running it in Dev mode. In all other cases, you just see a warning in the console (I just tested ansible), so it should be harmless. I know it pops up for some people, but I have no idea why.

[fbricon]

Also see microsoft/vscode#124662 for context

[ssbarnea]

@fbricon I observed it while running the UI tests, so that explains why we do not see more complaining about it. Still, this makes me think that we might be days away from Microsoft making it visible for everyone anyway. I am trying to figure out what I can do to avoid it, even in dev mode.

Wild guess is that the only practical solution is to make this setting specific to each extension. Is fun how our attempt to make things easier for the users produced so many problems.