GNOME-QA testing gnome extensions before release

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

So, I'm interested in making this GNOME Release to have no broken extensions.  We had a BOF and it has become a concern that extensions are causing a lot of disruptions for distributions and we need to find a way to flag broken extensions before it happens and file bugs against these extensions.  

Testing can be broken down to:

* Test extensions, if broken then:

* Test extensions without version checking, if they are fixed, we might want to just fix the versions ourselves.

* If they are broken, then we need to file bugs with the authors and get them to fix it before the release.  If they are not fixed then probably we need to publish an errata saying that these extensions are broken under testing.

We need to put the responsibility of maintaining these extensions back on authors as opposed to people yelling at us because extensions are broken.

Couple ideas on how to accomplish this:

* We have a extension test day, and set up volunteers/mentors to help people who come into test, and tehy can tell us what is broken and what isn't.

* We have some alias that people can mail, we have a webpage with instructions and then they can state what is broken and what isn't.  If we can find corresponding github it would be great to provide a link to it.

Whatever we need to do to start creating social pressure to fix brokenness.

In the meanwhile, I will work iwth the documentation team and shell team on documenting 'safe' apis so that there is a set of things people can rely on that we know won't break from release to release.

Thoughts?

sri