Re: getting rid of topbar

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Thu, 2011-07-14 at 13:54 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:

> They're three separate actors by design, because it's *really hard* to
> do it otherwise. I assume what you really want is a method or
> something that will hide all three for you. I doubt you're going to
> get that API: it doesn't really benefit us at all.

Florian already posted a cute snippet that ties the visibility of the
corners to the visibility of the main panel.

We need to strike a balance between these:

- Gnome-shell wants to have a coherent design.  Still, it needs to
accept that not everyone's needs are equal.

- People want extensions to tune gnome-shell to their particular usage.

- Extensions will find the points in the gnome-shell code where they
would like to "plug in", but they aren't clearly defined yet.

- Gnome-shell wants to keep evolving, and extensions to thrive, without
breaking all the time.

Considering all these, extension writers *will* find points where it is
cumbersome to extend gnome-shell.  The best thing gnome-shell can do is
to make those extension points easy and explicit; once we have them, we
can have a clear policy for deprecation of extension points if
gnome-shell ever needs to remove them because of other changes.  But in
the meantime, it's better to make it easy to write extensions, than to
shun them away because "gnome-shell doesn't need them".

Allow the ecosystem to build itself and it will be better for both
parts.

  Federico