Re: Plugins, modules and extensions

[Vamsi Krishna Brahmajosyula <vamsikrishna brahmajosyula gmail com>]

I am sorry for the late proposal, but I feel its important to put forward my views on extension management.

This is regarding the extension system.  A 'main' method to be called when the extension is loaded is a simple way to inject

code to the existing shell. What about un-doing certain changes with out having to reload the shell? If the developer of the extension

knows say ,how to add a button to the panel. He/she will definitely know how to revert it back. 

What I am proposing is to add an additional method say "unload" in the structure of extension.js (optional only). If the method is

found, the extension is eligible to unload dynamically with out "Alt+f2 < "r"" . The extensions listed in looking glass can now have additional method of load/unload based on whether the extension comes with one. I am not sure if this is planned already.  

It is just one step forward for having a central extension manager. It may not happen now but It would be good to have one. 

        extensionModule.main(meta); is for loading the extension

thanks

--

vamsi 

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:

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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