This proposal is an enhancement idea to the current dev container features proposal.

Breaking off from #44 (comment) to address @Chuxel 's option (1).

There are several ways we could pass an array of options to an individual features.

features: {
   apt: {
     "packages": ["vim", "jq", "curl"] // option A
     "packages": "vim jq curl" // option B 
   }
}

Under the hook, this would be converted to an environment variable for the underlying shell script to handle.

_BUILD_ARG_APT_GET_PACKAGES="vim jq curl"