Re: What about defined extensions points ?

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 5:48 AM, Alexandre Mazari <scaroo gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In its current incarnation, g-s extensions system give total freedom
> to arbitrary code: extensions have access to the whole environment to
> tweak with.
> While great flexibility and freedom are given to extensions authors,
> it might pose a problem of security and 'alienization' of the shell,
> making it a lot different from the lovingly crafted original
> experience.
> Furthermore, it makes developing an involving task because no clear
> and documented API is defined.
>
> Instead, it might be better to have clear extension points defined and
> hide unrelated data and logic.
> That'd gives the shell a way to control and restrict extensions and
> reduce the surface of exposed symbols while lowering the learning
> curve for newcomers.
>
> For example, API could be provided to
> - add a top bar menu
> - add amenu item to the user menu
> - add a new overview tab
> - add a search provider
> - ...

Some of these are extension points. We develop them when they're
needed. The reason they're not up-front is because we don't know what
people will use. If we concentrate our focus on something like the
dash icon to make jumplists, and everybody goes for the top panel,
it's an inefficient use of our time. We need to know what extensions
want to do before we start adding explicit extension point API. The
top panel was very popular, so we added an extension point solely for
extensions to use. See bug 653205[0] for that example.

[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653205

> What do you think ?
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-shell-list mailing list
> gnome-shell-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
>

  Jasper