Re: GNOME software 2.22 to also handle GNOME shell extensions

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On 29 March 2016 at 23:31, Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl> wrote:
> In case you did not package GNOME Software yet, for GNOME 2.22 the plan
> is to have it handle GNOME shell extensions as well. Currently the
> https://extensions.gnome.org/ website is pretty unmaintained, so I'm
> guessing that once Software handles it even less attention will be given
> to e.g. the browser plugin.

It's not really the lack of attention that motivated this move, it's
the fact we;re not going to be able to use NPAPI plugins in any of the
major browsers at some point in the near future.

> GNOME Software might require various things to get it working in your
> distribution. E.g. ensure packagekit works. That packagekit supports
> getting information about appdata file. Maybe build infrastructure to
> produce an overview of appdata files, etc.

You actually only need PackageKit support in gnome-software if you
want to allow installing shell-extensions-in-packages as well. If you
do this you'll need to use a newish version of appstream-builder when
generating the per-distro AppStream metadata as this needs to parse
the data too. If you're happy just installing all the plugins per-user
you should be able to get away with using a PackageKit-less
gnome-software, although this obviously isn't going to be an awesome
experience unless you also use xdg-app for all your desktop
applications for example.

Richard.