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

[Didier Roche <didrocks ubuntu com>]

Le 16/04/2018 à 15:10, Paul Court a écrit :
> Apologies in advance if this gets mixed up. I'm trying to reply to a 
> thread which was in progress before I joined the mailing list.
>
> I'm struggling to fully follow the in and out on the web version of 
> the thread 
> (https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2017-October/msg00034.html), 
> but if I am following along, it's an attempt to have some extensions 
> locked in from a system perspective in order to support QA and 
> security of the distro.
Exactly!
> However, instead of forking "dash to dock" and "KStatusNotifier" 
> into "ubuntu-dock" and "ubuntu-appindicator", would it make for a 
> better end user experience to instead improve the existing extensions 
> and update Gnome to support some kind of version "Lock" for the extension.

The whole forking process of those extensions (why, we had to do this) 
with upstream extension blessing was explained in details in the "Ubuntu 
GNOME Shell in artful" series: 
https://didrocks.fr/2017/08/03/ubuntu--guadec-2017-and-plans-for-gnome-shell-migration/ 
and the start of the series: 
https://didrocks.fr/2017/08/14/ubuntu-gnome-shell-in-artful-day-1/.

In particular, the part about the fork and extensions are laid out and 
explained in 
https://didrocks.fr/2017/09/04/ubuntu-gnome-shell-in-artful-day-9/.

Also note that everything not ubuntu specific was backported to those 
upstream extensions themselves, not only shipped in ubuntu dock.
> The interface could then advice the user that the extension forms part 
> of the supported system, and any updates could potentially reduce the 
> stability and security of the system. But ultimately this would allow 
> me as end end user to choose to replace with an updated "dash to dock" 
> if I so wish?

That doesn't prevent you to update dash to dock or any other non 
extensions not being part of the current mode. We also did a lot of 
extra work to ensure that you can use in the ubuntu session dash to dock 
itself instead of ubuntu dock. Have a read of the whole blog post series 
where everything is detailed there :)

Cheers,
Didier