Re: Gnome 3 Extensions/Themes Website?

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> Welp, I was going to have a thread announcing my work on this, but I
> guess I'll just hijack this one.

I knew this was on the cards but I have to say that I am surprised that
it is actually being pursued in this form.

Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users
seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design. We've fought
long and hard to give GNOME 3 a consistent visual appearance, to make it
synonymous with a single user experience and to ensure that that
experience is of a consistently high quality. A general purpose
extensions and themes distribution system seems to threaten much of
that.

I'm particularly surprised by the inclusion of themes. It seems bizarre
that we specifically designed the GNOME 3 control center not to include
theme installation/selection and then to reintroduce that very same
functionality via extensions.

So, I would very much like to hear about how this web site will relate
to our core design goals.

There are many possible roles for extensions and I am not saying they
shouldn't be supported at all. They are valuable as a crutch for our
traditional users who are upgrading from GNOME 2, for instance, and they
are an excellent facility for developing, testing and experimenting with
functionality that may eventually get folded into shell proper.

One possibility for extensions would be to turn them into something more
akin to Google Labs - that is, something that is communicated and
structured as an experimentation ground, rather than a market place that
we encourage users to use (the very name 'extension' does just that).
The other nice thing about Google Labs is that the experimental nature
of the features it contains is clearly communicated.

Allan
-- 
IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/