I am sorry for the late proposal, but I feel its important to put forward my
views on extension management.
This is regarding the extension system. A 'main' method to be called when
the extension is loaded is a simple way to inject
code to the existing shell. What about un-doing certain changes with out
having to reload the shell? If the developer of the extension
knows say ,how to add a button to the panel. He/she will definitely know how
to revert it back.
What I am proposing is to add an additional method say "unload" in the
structure of extension.js (optional only). If the method is
found, the extension is eligible to unload dynamically with out "Alt+f2 <
"r"" . The extensions listed in looking glass can now have additional method
of load/unload based on whether the extension comes with one. I am not sure
if this is planned already.
It is just one step forward for having a central extension manager. It may
not happen now but It would be good to have one.
extensionModule.main(meta); is for loading the extension
thanks
--
vamsi
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Giovanni Campagna <scampa.giova...@gmail.com
> wrote:
> This is the last day for feature proposals, but unfortunately I've been
> very busy lately and didn't have time to write it down formally. And
> actually, mine is more a question than a proposal: what are planning to
> do with additional functionality that is provided as plugins?
>
> I believe there are two specific questions we need to answer on this
> topic. The first one is technical, and related to distribution of code.
>
> Some of Core modules have related external modules that provide
> extensions, like eog-plugins, gedit-plugins, epiphany-extensions,
> gnome-shell-extensions, gnome-applets.
> First of all, should those modules be provided as tarballs? Last time I
> asked this for gnome-shell-extensions, I was answered no, because
> distributions should not provided packages of those. Nevertheless, all
> them appear packaged in most common distros, which makes that point
> moot, and actually increases the work required by packagers. Plus having
> git be the primary way to distribute code makes it difficult to mark
> buildable/usable release (both for distro packages and for manual
> building), resulting for example in people using g-s-extensions master
> with released (incompatible) gnome-shell.
> More on that: should those modules be part of the Core as well? On the
> one hand, they provide functionality that is additional to Core, and
> often against accepted design. On the other hand, they're often
> packaged, installed and used together with core modules, as well as
> having the same developers/maintainers.
>
> A different issue is then UI. Some time ago it was proposed to introduce
> addons.gnome.org, skip the (rpm/deb) packaging completely and just
> instruct users to go, download the plugin and install it.
> This has the problem that the plugin must be in an installable format
> (xpi?), not just a random python/js file to drop in .local/share (or
> even worse, an autotools tarball).
> I think we can solve this in the same way we're going to deal with Gnome
> Apps, by leveraging and extending PackageKit (with native repo
> metadata), meaning that users will be able to browse through extensions
> in gpk-application (or an improved software center-like app) or in the
> same UI they currently use for enabling/disabling them, and get them
> installed automatically from the repository.
> This would leave the problem of enabling third parties to provide
> plugins, but I believe it has to be solved at the distro level, if they
> want to have some kind of AppStore for unsupported externally-provided
> (often non-free) desktop apps.
>
> I'm looking forwards to see your opinions on these issues and I'm ready
> to help with whatever work (at the UI/platform/releng level) is needed
> to get a better plugin experience in GNOME 3.2
>
> Giovanni
>
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