Consider going into maintenance mode (officially) or deprecating

[calebcartwright]

I'm increasingly feeling that we should deprecate this extension, or at least officially mark it is in maintenance-only mode and close the remaining issues (it's been here functionally for at least a year).

The extension provides two pipeline tasks that respectively deliver two capabilities: install a specified version of ShellCheck, run ShellCheck

Thoughts anyone?

Install

In the intervening years since we originally released the extension, ShellCheck has been incorporated into the set of pre-installed software on the Linux agents/runners, so I think that largely obviates our install task for those able to use the Microsoft-hosted pools. Admittedly, it's not on the Mac nor Windows agents, nor does that cover self-hosted agents. However, ShellCheck can be easily grabbed on Mac and Windows using their respective package managers, and the AFAICT the main Linux package managers have relatively up to date versions of ShellCheck these days (wasn't the case back in the day).

Additionally, the install task could be fiddly. I know I've had trouble trying to use it at the day job with pipelines running on agents behind a proxy, to the point that I'd switched our own such pipelines to just use scripts 😱 @beverts312 correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you also just downloaded/used and ran ShellCheck natively in your pipelines as well right?

Run

The only real utility I see for the task that runs/executes ShellCheck is centered around the recursive file behavior. However, with the big shift to pipeline-as-code and the pending/inevitable decom of the UX/Visual Designer based pipelines it is much more common for devs to be working with their pipelines as code and more easily able to plug scripts in, and the benefits the custom task provided with buttons/navigators in the UX is going away.

It's not that hard to extend the script to run ShellCheck recursively in the Unix like/based environments, so I feel like the recursive behavior benefit largely boils down to Windows, and I just can't see there being a significant population of folks with valid use cases for massive ShellCheck use in a strictly Windows environment 😆

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Finally, worth noting both that we never saw a ton of market penetration (grand total of 79 installs), and it's also clear at this point that Microsoft/GitHub's energy and focus is on the GitHub Actions space so the ecosystem of potential consumers is only going to continue to decrease

[calebcartwright]

General agreement amongst maintainers per offline conversations, no community concerns/feedback provided, so I think this is the route we're going to go