Issues with PATH when multiple extensions contribute

[anthonykim1]

There were reports where when multiple extensions contribute environment, (such as that of $PATH),
the end result was not predictable, and could lead to unexpected scenarios where PATH can be overwritten via extensions, such as after some additions have been made by fnm, leading to 'node' is not recognized for the user.

Investigate where this is coming from, and if this is possible to prevent&resolve:

Planning to investigate:
Environment variable collection code, see if there could be racing condition, overriding scenarios, or potentially come up with special case for things like PATH where it can be constantly dynamically changed throughout dev process.

Perhaps even limiting extensions to calling replace on PATH and only allow prepend.

/cc @Tyriar @connor4312

[egormkn]

I just got this issue with ms-python.debugpy extension that was resetting the PATH value set by ms-python.python extension. When I activated the venv, its name was added to the prompt, but the PATH was not modified.

This page helped to understand what was going on: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/wiki/Activate-Environments-in-Terminal-Using-Environment-Variables

[elupus]

Yup. Just ran into this now. Really confusing.

[chr0m]

This was driving me nuts last night, spent hours on it and yeah, found that having the Python Debugger extension enabled causes the venv path to not be prepended to the path env var

So it seems if multiple extensions modify PATH, the last one wins. This is ridiculous tbh. Are we only supposed to have one extension enabled at a time or something? I've only just started using vscode heavily and came across this issue almost immediately and it's putting me off the whole idea.