Re: Start a gnome-shell-extensions repository / module

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

Il giorno mer, 12/01/2011 alle 10.19 +0100, Johannes Schmid ha scritto:
> Hi!
>  
> > >  * No tarballs
> > >  * A README file that requests that distributions *not* package it
> > 
> > Sorry but I don't understand this. The whole purpose of this is having
> > extensions in distributors. Why shouldn't they package it?
> > (A different matter is installing it by default. And of course when
> > installing the package you should start with all new extensions
> > disabled, similar to gnome-applets behavior)
> 
> While distributions seems to happily ignore those README files I see a
> lot of reasoning behind this.
> 
> gnome-applets was something you could install and later enable/disable
> in the UI. gnome-shell-extensions are there once you installed them and
> they may break the shell completely. As such, it is something that a
> "normal", "non-tuning" user shouldn't ever see because he doesn't know
> how to go back to text mode and remove the extension.

The same apply for gnome-shell, and I will work to make it part of GNOME
Shell 3.0 (inside Looking Glass, for now).

> Maybe the lack of a disable/enable UI is a bug but I don't see this
> fixed till 3.0 and as such we shouldn't rely on it.
> 
> Extensions are installed per user and as such package-management doesn't
> really make sense. There isn't (and shoundn't) be a system-wie extension
> installation path.

I don't agree with this. Some extensions are installed per user, but
some will be installed by the system administrator in a system path (and
locked down), or some will be installed automatically by specialistic
distros, or some will require a package because gnome-shell is patched.
Or just it will be provided by distros to make life easier for users
(think of the ubuntu additions to firefox to install plugins from the
repositories).
There are various reasons for distributions to ship
gnome-shell-extensions (maybe not now, because we don't actually have
many), even if addons.gnome.org becomes a reality.
(And don't forget that instead of addons.gnome.org it may be
addons.fedoraproject.org / addons.ubuntu.com / addons.debian.org, so
distribution packages would make sense even in that case)

Giovanni