Re: GNOME Shell Extensions 3.34.0

["Jason DeRose" <list derose io>]

As an extension developer, I don't think it's necessarily fair to burden the GNOME team with building a wrapper API and maintaining backwards compatibility forever. Even if this did come to fruition, it would likely end up too narrow in scope to give extensions the flexibility they enjoy now by being able to override basically any behavior in the shell.

That said, it is extremely frustrating that there is no possible way to fix and release an extension on extensions.gnome.org before a new GNOME release occurs. Breaking changes are made literally up until the Release Candidate is generated, and the extension review queue may sit untouched for months (which is a major problem itself). A week or two should be built into the timeline for extension developers to release an updated version to e.g.o., and then the extension review queue should be cleared before the new version is released.

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019, at 3:23 PM, Leslie S Satenstein via gnome-shell-list wrote:

Sadly, from one Gnome version or subversion to another, with each change, the majority of extensions are broken, and  "Florian Müllner",  that includes the ones you wrote. Many people are abandoning Gnome, simply because their favorite extensions no longer work.

I have a deep appreciation of the application development process and the QA that is needed. May I propose or suggest that there be an a new standardized interface for gnome extensions, an extension api, which will be responsible backend for the interfacing to the various gnome versions?  This api to  be providing a consistent interface for extension developers. My two favourite broken extensions are your menu extension and the Taskbar extension which works partially with Tumbleweed, fully with Centos, and not at all with recent Fedora's version 30  or any Linux Distribution using a Gnome version beyond 3.32.

Regards

 Leslie

Leslie Satenstein

Montréal Québec, Canada