SweetTooth's Slow Progress

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

Hey guys, it's Jasper.

The last time I talked  about SweetTooth[0] it was about the live enabling/disabling extensions proposal. I've been meaning to follow-up on this ML thread, but I was sidetracked: a bit annoyed with resizing on my new laptop, I started working on invisible borders in mutter, as a side-project. After a little while, this has been my main effort for a few weeks. Thankfully, this is almost about to land. The changes there also allowed for a simple implementation of anti-aliased corners, making gnome-shell look extremely nice! [1] See BGO bugs #644930 [2] and #628195 [3] for the implementation.




Additionally, I was waiting on getting the Shell changes in upstream. I had built up a number of patches for gnome-shell in my local stack, and wanted to land some of these before getting further I initially filed these as four or five different bug reports, which ended up being unwieldy. The new bug, BGO #654770 [4], has all the new patches for your eyes to review.




Before this is reviewed and landed, I want to make sure that everybody here will be able to port their extensions to the new API. See the old, invalid BGO bug #635209 [5] for a quick overview and the previous ML post [6] for a more in-depth take on it. Given that these are up and fairly stable, next Monday I'm going to start working on these features, besides some general polish:


  1. Writing and testing forward-compatibility in case I have to break the DBus API in the future. The website has to work from 3.2 onward for the rest of its life, even if most of the extensions don't. Using require.js and some clever hacking, I have this done and working in my local tree.

  2. Extension code review. For now, this will probably be a secure link to a .zip file with the code and a yay/nay with a comment option.

  3. After a crash, the fail-whale dialog will show you your enabled
 extensions with an option to disable them before restarting the Shell.

  4. Detecting a mismatch between your current Shell version and an 
extension's version, and prevent you from shooting yourself in 
the foot installing an out-of-date plugin.

  5. If an extension errors out, I'll be adding an option to mail the stack trace to the author.

Unfortunately, the delay means that I probably can't guarantee anything other than the features on this list in for 3.2. That said, if there's concerns or questions about this giant trainwreck, feel free to yell and/or ask.

  Jasper

[0] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/SweetTooth
[1] A WIP screenshot from about a week ago: http://i.imgur.com/DMo6N.png


[2] https:/bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644930
[3] https:/bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=628195


[4] https:/bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654770
[5] https:/bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635209


[6] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/msg00283.html