Re: Extensions Infrastructure Work

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

> 
> For those curious, the website's partner in crime is
> gnome-shell-extension-tool[2]. There's an option that runs a small
> HTTP server which the web site can talk to. The HTTP server is
> basically a dummy proxy so that the website can talk to DBus. Before
> this lands, I'll rewrite the HTTP server so it's not based on
> BaseHTTPServer and move it into its own script. Maybe I'll rewrite it
> in gjs+libsoup instead, because I'm not aware of any light-weight,
> solid HTTP servers in Python... I don't want to install Twisted on a
> user's desktop machine, even though I'd love to.

What is missing or wrong with Base/SimpleHTTPServer? Your implementation
in gnome-shell-extension-tool looks to do all it would ever need to do. 

If you rewrite it in gjs why not host the server in gnome-shell itself?
Is it just the problem of the server going down mid install because the
shell crashes?

It seems like in the spirit of a good install experience via the browser
the complexity of this has ballooned to include dependency resolution
(native and other extensions), rollback and upgrades, a local http
server dbus proxy, etc. Thats not necessarily a problem, but it makes me
nervous.

Personally I would ignore or prohibit inter-extension dependencies, and
perhaps only allow dependencies via checking for typelibs. I would put
the extension browsing/install/upgrade completely inside the shell or
completely outside of it.

John

p.s. If you claim extensions.gnome.org please place this at
http://extensions.gnome.org/shell/ as IIRC there is another SOC project
(or at least a plan) for a libpeas online extension story that might
result in websites at
http://extensions.gnome.org/appname_that_uses_libpeas/