Re: Plugins, modules and extensions

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Mon, 2011-05-09 at 17:50 +0200, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
> So .gsx (application/vnd.gnome.shell-extension) for the Shell, .gdp
> (application/vnd.gnome.gedit-plugin) for Gedit, .epe
> (application/vnd.gnome.epiphany-extension) for Ephiphany, etc.? How
> would it integrate with, for example, libpeas?

No, I was only talking about GNOME Shell. I don't know if there are any
plans for application extensions to go for the web route as well, but if
they do I don't see how they'd need a dedicated UI - all applications
you mention already provide UI for extension management, it'd seem more
natural to extend those as necessary (of course that doesn't mean that
code couldn't be shared between those applications).

GNOME Shell is a bit special in that it should not have a brand of its
own (e.g. users shouldn't need to know that they are running gnome-shell
any more than they needed to know they were running gnome-panel
+metacity). It's basically the "desktop chrome of GNOME 3" - which makes
for a horrible brand :-)

For extensions, this also means that there's no good place for an UI yet
- we don't (and shouldn't) have any GNOME Shell Settings. Looking glass
is a developer tool, I don't think it is where we expect users to manage
extensions. Exposing extensions in the overview (as suggested at some
point) is completely out of the question. Hence my suggestion to have a
dedicated application to manage desktop extensions.

Florian