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. Instead, make it easy for extension authors to keep
their extensions up to date with the changes.
https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions#Creating_an_Extension is a good
start, but compare
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Extensions. I'm
not meaning to criticize by any means -- I just think this would be a good
area to emulate.
--
Matthew Miller ☁☁☁ Fedora Cloud Architect ☁☁☁ <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>