Integrating extensions with releases

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Hello folks,

We've been having some discussions in the marketing team regarding frequent (and valid) criticism regarding the availability of extensions after a release from the community at large.

What are our current plans for addressing this?  I've heard from some sources that we have a plan.  If I recall, we had some talk about porting the top 10 most popular extensions prior to release.  I think we need to do a little more than that.

We should prepare an image for porting extensions prior to code freeze so that we can give extension writers a chance to port their extensions over.  We should probably put a disclaimer that we reserve the right to modify some extensions explicitly to make  it work with our release.  Given that the license for most extensions is the GPL, this should not pose a problem?  Essentially, I want to bring extension writers in as part of the GNOME release mechanism.

If we want to go for gold, we should set up some kind of automatic testing for extensions just to check out which are immediately broken and needs active porting and others that show no errors and can be manually tested by volunteers and bug reports filed against those extensions.

sri