Re: Integrating extensions with releases

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

hi;

I think I've been harsher than necessary — mostly due to my
misunderstanding. it was not my intention, and I apologize for that.

No worries.  It seems that I have given the impression that GNOME would take on the tasks of porting extensions instead of having extension writers do it.  That is was not my intent.

On 2 April 2013 13:07, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

> On 2 April 2013 06:45, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> the "community at large" being...?
>
> also, why is marketing-list involved at all? I don't think the
> marketing team should be the first line of defence when it comes to
> developers and users relations — mostly because of the size of the
> marketing team.

I'd like to clarify this: I think the marketing team is in the right
place as an interface with the GNOME community and its developers, as
an extension of their work to improve the communication channels
between the project and its users; I'm less sure about them having the
resources to care about development issues — we do have venues for
discussing (and/or bikeshedding) technical issues already. it's great
to raise the issues on those venues, which Sri has done, so thanks; my
feeling is that there are a *ton* of communication issues that should
be addressed before the stability of the internal Shell API with
regards to extension points than can effectively turn a User
Experience from the current design to something that looks like GNOME

We aren't worried about development issues.  We (and mostly I here) am passing on a concern and then suggesting a simple solution of providing an image and some structure.

This will likely become less of an issue as you rightly pointed out as the API stablizes and extensions do not break from one release to another.  The image is still useful for gathering community feedback prior to the release.  It's not our usual modus operand and we would probably be the first project to do it.  But then we are the first project to use designers and have them central to our software, isn't it? 

 

2 — in other words: with great power comes great responsibility, and
that includes extension developers. ;-)

this particular issue has been raised multiple times already, and it's
something everyone even tangentially related to working on the shell
is acutely aware of. :-)

Indeed.  I'm trying to put it out in the open and have a casual conversation about it. :-)

 

I think people take for granted, these days, the extensions in
Firefox, and either weren't there or just forgot the misery that was
upgrading your browser during the early days; the situation has
improved *a lot*, but mostly it's just that time has stabilised the
internal interfaces available to the developers of extensions — and
GNOME Shell hasn't had 15 years to grow yet.

This is an excellent point and I re-iterated it above.  This problem generally goes away when the API stablizes.  But I suspect that we are quite a few releases out for that.

my point about having a proper "developers channel" dovetails with the
Testable/GnomeOS/OSTree effort, so I think a lot of the current issues
with regards to QA and development churn and friction are going to be
solved, or at least addressed, by that.

You and I are on exactly the same page here.  I do not see any disagreement here.  Having that image as  a way to test is going to solve it.  The only thing I'm adding is we provide some organization and leadership.

sri

 

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

--
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/