Re: gnome shell extension development environment

["Norman L. Smith" <nls1729 gmail com>]

>From your post I get the impression you may not have used the Autoconf
and Automake tools. 

Jasper's comments sum up the reasons pro and con for the Autoconf and
Automake type of environment quite well.

<IMVHO> I would suggest that you clone the
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-extension repository.  With a
few changes to the configuration files you can make it your own.  I
pared it down to only the "example" extension, changed it to create my
uuid, etc. and then had a place to experiment. The "example" extension
is an excellent example of the new features in 3.4. I am familiar with
Autoconf and Automake but I am mostly guided by "the monkey see, monkey
do approach".  If you have the time learning to use these tools can be
quite useful.  There is much head shaking voodoo but learning to use
them is worth the time and trouble.
</IMVHO>

A good reason to setup this type of environment is "make zip-file".
With the tweak tool installing and updating extensions is quite simple. 

Testing extensions that use gsettings with gnome-shell-extensions-prefs
rounds out the changes in 3.4.  I mention gnome-shell-extensions-prefs
because I must have missed something somewhere because it took me longer
to find it than anything else. It is hidden on purpose(?). It must of
have been mentioned by name somewhere but my googling didn't find it.  

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Amy C <mathematical coffee gmail com>
wrote:
> Hi gnome-shell-list,
>
> I've recently started toying with writing my own extensions for the
> gnome shell. I had a few progressing nicely in GNOME 3.2, but have
> recently upgraded my OS which comes with GNOME 3.4.
>
> The differences between these had led me to wonder - is there some
> standard setup other extension developers use for developing their
> extensions?
>
> At the moment I have a (personal for now) mercurial repository with my
> extension and just the metadata.json, extension.js and stylesheet.css
> committed. However in my quest to understand the differences between a
> typical extension's code between 3.2 and 3.4, I had a look at
> http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-extensions to see how it was
> done.
>
> I notice the whole makefile structure to the project, with the
> 'extensions', 'po', etc directories and where the metadata.json in the
> actual extension folder are more template-like.
> Also, I had a look at the gnome-shell-extension-weather repository on
> github (& a few others) and notice a similar 'src', 'po', 'data',
> 'config' directories with the Makefile sitting outside these.
>
> Is this the recommended way to set up a development environment for
> extensions as opposed to just having the
> 'folder/{extension.js,metadata.json,stylesheet.css}' structure? How do
> I go about setting this up for my own extensions (& do you do one
> repository for all your extensions, like git.gnome.org, or one setup
> per extension, like gnome-shell-extension-weather?). I like the
> 'folder/{extension.js,metadata.json,stylesheet.css}' structure because
> then when I move between computers it's simple to "install" the
> extension - just copy the entire folder. If I move to the Makefile
> environment, I feel this makes installation/distribution harder
> because potential users have to make/make install to make sure the
> schema (for the settings) & similar get installed properly - or is it
> just as simple, but just something I don't understand? Would you just
> do a `make zip-files` & upload the zip to the repository page for
> users who do not want to build the extension?
>
> Thanks for your insights - I'm just exploring options as to how to set
> up a "good" development environment for extensions that I want to
> fiddle with.
>
> thanks,
> Amy
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> gnome-shell-list gnome org
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Good luck,
Norman