Enable using custom esbonio python package

[AlexanderLanin]

What would you like to see

I'm not sure if an option is missing or simply not documented. What I would usually want to do (unfortunately) is debug into the python part of esbonio. Not all of esbonio. I don't know TypeScript, I don't know how extensions in VS Code work. Just the python part...

However, as far as I can tell the VS Code extension will always use the bundled python module for the server.
The server loads sphinx_agent also from the bundled python module (which I don't quite understand since bundled is appended, I thought it would prefer the one from the python environment).

So what seems to be missing is a config option like use_host_esbonio_python_package, use_bundled_esbonio_python_package or some sort of custom_esbonio_python_package.

[alcarney]

The server loads sphinx_agent also from the bundled python module (which I don't quite understand since bundled is appended, I thought it would prefer the one from the python environment).

The design of the 1.0 version of esbonio is meant to remove the need to install it into every environment you wish to use it with. Instead you can install it once and can use it across all of your projects - which is much closer to how other language servers work.

When launching a Sphinx subprocess esbonio will manipulate the PYTHONPATH environment variable to inject the sphinx_agent module into the target environment. By making it so that the bundled sphinx_agent is always used, there's no risk that the server side code and the sphinx side code fall out of sync with each other.

What I would usually want to do (unfortunately) is debug into the python part of esbonio. Not all of esbonio.

From an end user point of view, I think having the extension always use the bundled version of esbonio simplifies things. However, I think for your use case I think it definitely makes sense to have a developer option where you can point the extension at a different version of the package.

[AlexanderLanin]

In the meantime I figured out I can modify /home/alex/.vscode-server/extensions/swyddfa.esbonio-0.96.0/bundled/libs/esbonio/. That's actually sufficient for me at the moment.

But this option would still make sense for folks wanting to create PRs. It's just easier when you can point it to e.g. your editable pip esbonio installation.

[alcarney]

I haven't got around to documenting this yet, but another option might be to clone this repo and run

$ cd code/
$ make install

It will build the extension in such a way you can install it as a local workspace extension and it will use the version of esbonio from the lib/esbonio folder.

$ ls -l .vscode/extensions/esbonio/bundled/libs/
...
lrwxrwxrwx@    - alex 21 Oct 20:23 esbonio -> /workspaces/develop/code/../lib/esbonio/esbonio
...

Then by enabling the esbonio.server.debug option, it should be possible to debug the server process