This is the last day for feature proposals, but unfortunately I've been very busy lately and didn't have time to write it down formally. And actually, mine is more a question than a proposal: what are planning to do with additional functionality that is provided as plugins? I believe there are two specific questions we need to answer on this topic. The first one is technical, and related to distribution of code. Some of Core modules have related external modules that provide extensions, like eog-plugins, gedit-plugins, epiphany-extensions, gnome-shell-extensions, gnome-applets. First of all, should those modules be provided as tarballs? Last time I asked this for gnome-shell-extensions, I was answered no, because distributions should not provided packages of those. Nevertheless, all them appear packaged in most common distros, which makes that point moot, and actually increases the work required by packagers. Plus having git be the primary way to distribute code makes it difficult to mark buildable/usable release (both for distro packages and for manual building), resulting for example in people using g-s-extensions master with released (incompatible) gnome-shell. More on that: should those modules be part of the Core as well? On the one hand, they provide functionality that is additional to Core, and often against accepted design. On the other hand, they're often packaged, installed and used together with core modules, as well as having the same developers/maintainers. A different issue is then UI. Some time ago it was proposed to introduce addons.gnome.org, skip the (rpm/deb) packaging completely and just instruct users to go, download the plugin and install it. This has the problem that the plugin must be in an installable format (xpi?), not just a random python/js file to drop in .local/share (or even worse, an autotools tarball). I think we can solve this in the same way we're going to deal with Gnome Apps, by leveraging and extending PackageKit (with native repo metadata), meaning that users will be able to browse through extensions in gpk-application (or an improved software center-like app) or in the same UI they currently use for enabling/disabling them, and get them installed automatically from the repository. This would leave the problem of enabling third parties to provide plugins, but I believe it has to be solved at the distro level, if they want to have some kind of AppStore for unsupported externally-provided (often non-free) desktop apps. I'm looking forwards to see your opinions on these issues and I'm ready to help with whatever work (at the UI/platform/releng level) is needed to get a better plugin experience in GNOME 3.2 Giovanni
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