DevContainer/GitHub/spec/Process

• Process for submitting a revision to the DevContainer spec

  • via Comment/My in GitHub/community/community Forum/post Reference dotfiles repository in devcontainer.json for Codespaces · community · Discussion #134612

    • There are quite many users who are not developers but would greatly benefit from a cool ready-to-use Codespace instance that they can still customize and (!) personalize in their own way, while they don't need to start from scratch for personalization.
      

    • Since the advent of vibe coding in Feb 2025, more non-software-engineers using Github, and in my opinion that's a really good thing both for software and for GitHub. The feature you described would make it easier for UX, PM, QA and other IC roles be able to feel at home with a basic, customizable setup in GitHub without needing to jump through additional hoops. This is particularly true today since AI coding agents are customized with dotfiles!
    • I would love to see a mature version of this make its way through the containers.dev standards process.
    • The guidelines for submitting proposals is supposed to be at https://github.com/devcontainers/spec/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md according to https://github.com/devcontainers/spec/blob/main/proposals/README.md.
    • Looking at recent changes, I think a github issue like https://github.com/devcontainers/spec/issues/129 would need to be submitted, and then the devcontainer maintainers would need to approve the submission of a concrete proposal MR like https://github.com/devcontainers/spec/pull/209, which would result in a proposal being accepted like https://github.com/devcontainers/spec/blob/main/proposals/features-library.md.
    • Are you using devcontainer-features/src/codespaces-dotfiles at main · jpawlowski/devcontainer-features today? Has it been an acceptable workaround to this problem for you for now?
    • Another thing that I've considered is creating a dotfiles github template for my github org(s) and then including AI skills that would enable users to have the AI configure it for them. This has its drawbacks, of course, but it might come with advantages related to having AI skills that sit alongside dotfiles.
    • Consider submitting your devcontainer feature to webpro/awesome-dotfiles: A curated list of dotfiles resources.. I've noticed that there aren't many resources there that are specific to the intersection of dotfiles and devcontainers.