On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 10:58 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 12:18:16PM +0100, Florian Müllner wrote: > > > GNOME decided to break it all the time (can't even get extensions work > > > from one gnome-shell version to the next one and no gracefully disabling > > > is still functional breakage). > > So what do you suggest? We can either > > (1) restrict the functionality extension can provide (e.g. "add an icon > > with a menu to the top bar" - of course that'd mean no alternate-tab, > > shell-shape, alternative-status-menu etc.) > > (2) cease development of gnome-shell > > I think there's probably a third way. It used to be that Firefox extensions > broke with every update, but now that really rarely happens. That's partly > because the base program has kind of stablized, but also because there's a > nice developer ecosystem, with good supporting documentation and tons of > tutorials. I think it's important to grow that for Gnome Shell, with good > communication about migrating extensions as new versions come out. Firefox intentionally avoided creating any sort of API for extensions for a number of years, which allowed them to see what sort of things people wanted to do and how to create an API. That was the foundation of the Firefox ecosystem and inspired me. We may also eventually create more of an API for shell extensions - it remains to be seen. Without doing that, there are a number of things we can do, including. * Improve documentation of extension creation. The documentation about how to create an extension is fragmentary and scattered. * Improve documentation of the shell codebase. Never hurts! * Have VM images available for extension testing when a GNOME release freezes. * Actively notify extension author to update their extension for the next release. I'd like to invite anybody who or has ideas or wants to help out with this to take this up further in desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or, better, in GNOME communication channels - this is a long ways from subject of this thread. :-) - Owen -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
