extension continuity [was Re: Goals for Fedora Workstation upgrades]

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 11:53:07AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Since extensions aren't (in general) shipped by Fedora, we have only a
> limited ability to make requirements about them. The GNOME behavior
> (unless overridden by an hidden gsetting) is that extensions are assumed
> *NOT* to work with new versions of GNOME unless explicitly marked as
> such. So what happens, is that if you upgrade early to a new version of
> GNOME, all your extensions might vanish, but you won't end up with a
> broken desktop.

I don't mean this in a high-drama way, but: there are several extensions
which have become really ingrained in the way I use my GNOME desktop, and if
they vanished, I would feel like my desktop were broken for me.

So....

> GNOME extensions should definitely be doing better in various ways on
> upgrades:
> 
>  - Having a test image available to authors and easy ways to deploy
>    extensions into that image running into a VM; the author shouldn't
>    have to set up a devel environment inside the VM.
>  - Mailing extension authors as soon as the next version of GNOME is
>    frozen with instructions for testing.
>  - Actively reach out to authors of the most popular extensions and
>    try to make sure that we have them covered.
>  - And actually have extension upgrade integration into the desktop  
> 
> Unfortunately, right now, there's nobody working on any of this.

a huge vote for all of this. It's really important for a non-scary Fedora
Workstatation upgrade experience. If we can find someone to work on this, I
think it will pay off.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader