Re: Integrating extensions with releases

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 8:05 AM, Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com> wrote:

On 04/02/2013 07:45 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
>
> Hello folks,

I agree with most of the comment from Emmanuele, so I will not repeat
them, but I will add some comments.

>
> We've been having some discussions in the marketing team regarding
> frequent (and valid) criticism regarding the availability of
> extensions after a release from the community at large.

I know that this question can sound harsh, it is not my intention: In
which sense those criticism are valid?

AFAIK, there isn't any place on gnome-shell documentation (on
gnome-shell itself, live.gnome.org, etc) saying that gnome-shell would
provide a stable "API" to the extensions. So unless their criticism is
based on a lack for a explicit disclaimer saying that, I don't see how a
criticism related with a extension stopping to work after a release
could be valid.

It's a valid criticism because as a project we should at least step in to help inform extension writers when a release is coming and encourage them to port their extensions.  It would be nice to port the top 10 extensions from the onset I think.  Basically GNOME is providing a framework for getting their extensions out for the benefit of the community.

We are on the hook, because are providing the capability and we have a website advertising the work so we should have some sense to be responsible for keeping the extensions updated from release to release.  How much depends on our resources of course.

 

>
> We should prepare an image for porting extensions prior to code freeze
> so that we can give extension writers a chance to port their
> extensions over.

Who is 'we'? What do you mean for "image"? Do you mean adding a new
period on the GNOME schedule in order to port extensions?

We as a project, we can use ostree for instance for image generation.  Image is basically a distribution, maybe that's a fedora snapshot or ostree or something that provides a gnome release that people can use without having to spend the time trying to compile from source which from personal experience can be a very frustrating experience.

I do mean adding a period in the release process to get community involved in porting the extensions as part of the release process.

 

> We should probably put a disclaimer that we reserve the right to
> modify some extensions explicitly to make  it work with our release.
>  Given that the license for most extensions is the GPL, this should
> not pose a problem?

As others said, I really think that the best candidates to update a
extension due a gnome-shell release are the extensions writers, and not
'we'.

We're talking about providing a framework.  It might be that the top 10 extensions would make sense to port especially if they are abandonware.

 

>  Essentially, I want to bring extension writers in as part of the
> GNOME release mechanism.

I agree that it would be good to make extension writers life easier. But
as I said, as part of bring them in, I really think that if they are
interested, they should be the ones porting the extension they wrote.

I think there is a bit of a communication issue.  I apologize if I gave the impression that the project is going to take the trouble to port extensions. That is not my intention.  My intention is to provide a schedule and valid tools for them to do the work without having to put a lot of time.  The only thing 'we' are on the hook for is to provide an image for them to test their extensions out so that they can verify it works.  So they have a reasonable time frame to do it.

sri

BR

--
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias

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