Re: Why gnome-shell disables the extensions when the screen is idle?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

On 17 March 2016 at 14:53, Juan Simón <decedion gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm writing an extension to monitor a background process. It changes the
> icon depending on whether the process is running or not. And it alerts me
> when the process ends with sounds, icon change and a notification.

I don't think this should be an extension, really.

You can write a simple daemon that checks the state of the background
process, and have the daemon emit the sound/notification. The
extension could also listen to that daemon, if the daemon exposes some
sort of DBus interface, and change the icon (wherever that may be)
while the session is unlocked.

Also, remember: extensions run inside the same process as your
compositor. Thus, extensions should never do anything more complicated
that show something, to avoid blocking the rendering pipeline that
presents things you see on your display.

> The development has been almost too complicated by the lack of documentation
> and outdated documentation.

That's sadly true.

> But the worst is that it was a futile effort because when the screen is
> idle, gnome-shell disables the extensions. Why?

It's a security measure.

Since an extension can do whatever it wants with the UI, it can also
read the user's credentials from the session unlock screen;
alternatively, it could take over the whole thing, and impersonate the
user.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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