Re: GNOME Shell and system extensions being part of a mode

[Jason DeRose <list derose io>]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017, at 09:12 AM, Didier Roche wrote:

The issue of letting users upgrading is the proposal of auto-updating. Nothing will tell that a new release of distribution X will have a newer GNOME Shell, and so, version compatibility check (which is currently disabled in most places) won't prevent people to ugprade to a new*unsupported* version of the extension, which didn't go to the same QA rules than a traditional Stable Release Update.

Remember that I'm not proposing to favor system extensions for all extensions, due to the issue you are describing (stalled or old versions). I'm only suggesting this for system extension enabled from the current mode (which are already unconditionnally enabled).

In the Ubuntu case for instance, we offer another session with no extensions enabled by default via a vanilla GNOME Shell look and behavior. On this one, people would be able to use the new, user's local version of those extensions.

However, you can consider extensions enabled as part of a mode as being really part of the Shell, which means, the default desired behavior which has to be QAed, controlled and such.

Making sense?

Didier

What one user calls "supported" another calls "stale". Just because a session enables an extension doesn't necessarily mean the user wants the old version of the extension. (I don't like that the user can't disable the session-enabled extensions, anyway - the session configuration should remember the user's configuration, not force the distro's configuration upon them.. but that's a different discussion).

From the Ubuntu standpoint, if you only block extensions from the current session, you would cause users to potentially "break" the other sessions on their system, and possibly encounter the issue when logging into that session at a later time. It seems that you wouldn't want update notifications prompting the user to replace an ubuntu version with an e.g.o version, ever. Otherwise a user could login to their Vanilla session and overwrite packages needed by the default session.

The core issue in my opinion is competing platforms trying to maintain specific different versions of the same files - which is why I suggested allowing them to live side-by-side from multiple sources and allow the user to toggle between them if they so desire. The users who don't care and want things to "just work" would never get a notification about an extension that ubuntu had installed - those extensions would just be maintained by the distro's package manager.