Re: Task Panel

[jhs jsschmid de]

Hi Florian!

> Everything in the panel is actually an applet, no matter whether we
> consider it "essential" or not. So it's perfectly valid to replace the
> default configuration with a single panel containing nothing but Wanda
> the fish, GEyes and a custom launcher for "wine solitaire.exe". Not very
> useful, but that's the point here: gnome-panel is pretty useless itself
> without any additional components (menu, notification area, window
> list, ...), which are all optional - in fact, it is not uncommon for
> users to replace the bottom panel and its applets with an alternative
> dock.
>
> The shell on the other hand aims to provide a more or less inmutable
> core - a set of elements which we can assume to be there and work
> consistently on different installations, which guarantees that the shell
> will be usable: you won't be able to right-click the Activities button
> and select "Remove from panel" ...

I agree with your point that different people will have different
workflow. There is a problem for it currently though:

 * gnome-panel used to ship most of the applets (even some I really
wouldn't consider essential) and there was also a clear way how applets
can be distributed.

 * gnome-shell won't ship ANY extensions by default and there is no clear
way how to distribute them right now nor a way for the user to activate
extensions through an UI.

The latter is really holding me back from writing an extension currently.
Maintaining something externally is a lot of work because you have to
adapt all API changes (and gnome-shell is a rather moving target) and you
have to find some way to distribute it. In addition people need to find
the extension somehow.

These things are far easier when extensions are bundled with the shell (or
at least in some blessed gnome-shell-extensions package because usually,
unless the API changes completely, all the people testing and building
will fix things with trivial commit and the user and tester base is far
bigger.

We only have some months till gnome-shell/GNOME 3.0 will be released and
we really need to resolve these extension issues soon if there will be
some amount of useful extensions shipped with GNOME 3.0. As module
proposal is already over I guess an external extension package is already
out of discussion.

Regards,
Johannes