Re: gnome-software and external plugins

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On 22 May 2016 at 18:30, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> GNOME Shell extensions have this same problem. Firefox did better, but
> in the end it too had to give up; you've probably heard all its
> extensions need to be rewritten now.

Right; in one sense plugins let us prototype some new things easily
(that are headed upstream) and it also lets us support some of the
"enterprise" funk that big companies are asking us for in RHEL.
Compiling a plugin is a one line gcc command rather than building half
of GNOME in jhbuild which makes it easier to get started.

> It's not that external plugins in general are bad, it's that allowing
> them access to your application's internals is bad.

100% agree. To compile an out of tree plugin you have to define the
alarmingly-obnoxious-and-long
I_KNOW_THE_GNOME_SOFTWARE_API_IS_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE and we really
restrict the API that plugins can use; I've been carefully splitting
out functionality into -private.h headers recently that plugins have
no business meddling with and I'm quite happy with the minimal API
surface I'm presenting so far. I guess my statement about out-of-tree
plugins being a bad idea in the introduction perhaps isn't strong
enough, I can certainly ramp up this if you think it would help. From
my point of view if I break your external plugin due to an API change
in the core you should have pushed your changes upstream sooner.

Richard