Re: Concerning the javascript code location and extensions

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

I understand your goal, but the Shell isn't really designed as a platform for WMs: it's an extensible WM. I think that the approach of taking the parts of the shell that make 
sense, like gjs, mutter, clutter and st/mx and creating another WM may 
be the better approach. If you want to pretend that the Shell is a platform to hack on top of, you can use the JS files, but this is at your own caution. The environment variables, designed to make the developer's lives easier and may not do what you want, are listed in the gnome-shell-jhbuild.in wrapper script in the source tree.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 10:01 AM, D.H. Bahr <dbahr uci cu> wrote:

We would use this for changing the Information Architecture of the shell itself.
Allow me to explain myself: our biggest client is the Public Sector which is instructed to migrate from privative to free software thus becoming our goal to provide a system that facilitates this process. That is why the previous versions of our system (Nova GNU/Linux) have a Windows-like look. For our next version, planned for release on February 2013, we would like to modify the shell so it looks as Windows-like as possible, but without removing the possibility of trying the shell itself as a GDM session. In short we need two separates GDM sessions: one for the original shell and another one for our Windows-like one.
We are also concerned that the inclusion of many extensions might lower the overall system performance, since it is more _javascript_ code that will be loaded.
Currently we are looking at the Shell more as a platform for Desktop Development than as a Desktop itself.

Best regards, and thanks for caring about this,

--

Sw.E. D.H. Bahr

Nova Desktop Development Leader

CESOL (Free/Libre Software Centre)

UCI (University of Informatics Sciences)

Havana, Cuba

El Wed, 31-08-2011 a las 09:44 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre escribió:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 5:29 AM, D.H. Bahr <dbahr uci cu> wrote:

Hello everyone!
At Nova we have a service we call Customized OS: on which we create a GNU/Linux Distro molded for specific customer's needs. As from the arrival of G3 we have started thinking on adding to this service a Customized Desktop Environment, since GShell loads arbitrary _javascript_ code it shouldn't be so hard, but the thing is it loads the code from a specific location.
I know the customization of G3 could (and should) be done at extensions level, but it doesn't feel right to do so in this particular case: we want to develop a customized Desktop Environment, not a GShell patched to look different, and we certainly would rather avoid renaming the libraries so GShell and whatever we call the new environments could coexist on the repository.
This brings me to the question in question: is it (could it be) possible to specify as an argument to gnome-shell to state where should the _javascript_ code be loaded from??

There is, but it's considered for internal and development use only. In my opinion, the extensions system is the only supported way of modifying the Shell. Of course, distros are free to patch the code directly. May I ask what kinds of chnages you want to make to the Shell to give you the best solution? If there are specific thing you'd like the extensions system to do, I'd gladly help you along with that.

Best regards, and keep with the great work,

-- 
  Jasper