Re: Extensions review

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 6:34 AM, Sam Bull <sam hacking sent com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Carlos Soriano Sánchez
> <carlos soriano89 gmail com> wrote:
> > Sriram,
> > Still, that's more work for developers, who already seems to be working on
> > something else more important upstream. At the end, what we need is someone
> > to go trough commits and make a list of important changes before a release.
> > Not sure who be willing to do so, although Drago did it last release, I
> > don't know how time consuming was to do it.
>
> Is this actually something that can be achieved for all extension
> developers? The way it can hack into the code surely means that any
> change could break an extension.
>
> For example, my extension, when updating to a new version, I've had most
> of the shell overlay change out from under me, and it took me days or
> weeks to hack back in to the new code to get my extension running.
>         Another time, my extension only broke due to a single attribute in the
> shell being renamed to not have a preceding '_'.

It would be great to see shell interfaces stabilize, but I'm not sure
if it will or not.  As long as we continue to evolve the shell, I
expect some breakages.  Doing the exercise at least we know if the
breakages are going up or down.  If we have a downward trend then that
would be awesome to know. :)

> Maybe this is not the type of extension that is targeted by this effort,
> would these changes likely help other extension developers?

Well, I think it will, certainly if you know things like an attribute
changing that would be good to know, right?

sri