Gnome Shell Extension manager/framework planned?

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Michael Wiktowy wrote:
>> The cognative dissonance required to misconstrue an extension
>> framework that has provided people with a previously impossible amount
>> of customization in Gnome as something negative is quite astounding.
>
> The complaint is not about the fact that GNOME 3 is extensible, but about
> the fact that extensions are required for many things which should be built
> in, either by default (e.g. the "shut down" entry in the menu) or as an
> option.

Yes. I happen to agree with that complaint and have installed the
appropriate extension as a result. However, I was equally happy to
just configure my power button to power off instantly rather than
hibernate as an acceptable alternative that is in some ways even
better than an option that pops up another dialog.

... and that complaint (which seems to snarkily creep into every
single gnome-shell conversation regardless of applicability) has
little to do with my response. Read it again in the context of the
leap in logic from premise to conclusion in the quoted text ... and in
the persecution complex replies further up ... and in various other
numerous threads elsewhere that at time same time complain that Gnome
developers are imposing their rigid world-view on them while, at the
same time, offering an amazingly accessible extensibility ... a low
enough barrier to entry that even I (with my meagre coding skills) am
thinking of exploring the potential.

I'm not terribly interested in making this another dog pile thread of
people meta-arguing about people's world views of the way gnome-shell
ought to have been designed and that everyone else besides them are
flat-out wrong. There are many world-views out there. Some think that
every option should be installed by default and selectable through
configuration panels. Others think that good defaults should be chosen
and that everyone should be forced into the model that was provided.

I think that the gnome-shell option of offering a very basic, trimmed
to the bone efficient desktop as a base to allow people to easily
extend is a good middle ground that should satisfy the
base-system-minimalists, total-newb-users and (maybe in time, once
there are more extensions out there) the feature-maximalists all at
the same time.

Sometimes we have to get a little wet to get to the other side of the
river. I just hope that other side of the river includes some system
to configure extensions that doesn't involve editing text files or
poking values into dconf using gsettings from the command line.

/Mike