We had a BOF during GUADEC to address the extensions breakage that we have
every cycle.

The consensus is that we would work on two things:

1) Document a public api that we know will not be subject to a lot of
changes.  We aren't providing guarantees, but merely that using these api
that it is going to be unlikely that it will break.  We want to document it
so that extension writers will use them, if they go off into the weeds then
there is a chance of breakage.  At least though it will be their decision.

2) We want to start getting people to start testing extensions prior to the
final release.  GNOME itself is being blamed for the breakage, and that
might be reasonable if there is some flux.  However, some extensions break
because the version has not been updated (sri raises his hand as a guilty
party)

The current proposal for 2) is to have a extension testing day where we get
people to test extensions based on a 3.17.9? image.  We will test
extensions with both version checking and without version checking.  If an
extension works without version checking then, likely we can just update
the json file directly.  If it fails without version checking then we
should file bugs against the extension if possible or put out a errata on
the mailing list.

The responsibility then lies on the extension writer to update their code
to work with the release.

Hopefully, we can catch 90% of broken extensions.

I'd like start moving forward towards the end of next week and organizing a
day for this testing.  Now, it would be nice if we can figure out if each
extension has a pointer to a git repository and bug tracker though.  I
don't know if we have something like that.

If there are any extensions writer on the list, I would like to hear your
thoughts on this.

sri
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