Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[drago01]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 5:17 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 05:02:21PM +0100, drago01 wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> No sorry but that's nonsense. Tutorials do not change anything here. The
>> problem is how extension work. You can either have a fixed API with
>> defined entry points, which you can commit to keep stable but it would
>> limit what extensions can do. Or you allow extensions to change the code
>> directly (through monkey patching etc) which means they have the freedom
>> to do whatever they want but at the same time any code change in the area
>> you modify directly would break it. Gnome-shell currently does the latter.
>
> I don't see how anything you say makes what I said "nonsense". Maybe I just
> wasn't clear enough. I'm not suggesting that extensions would be kept
> working unmodified.

That's how I read your other mail which made no sense to me hence the
"nonsense" ;)

> Instead, make it easy for extension authors to keep
> their extensions up to date with the changes.

Sure but given that extensions can modify pretty much anything that
would imply documenting every code change.
We kind of have that in the code repos but having separate
documentation for everything would not scale
with the man power we have. But given that the code does not change as
much as it used to (that's not a guarantee though)
such problems might become less common in the feature.

Extension authors also have some time to adjust to changes during the
prerelease period.