Hey, On Fri, 2011-06-10 at 11:25 +0100, Allan Day wrote: > Jasper St. Pierre wrote: > > Welp, I was going to have a thread announcing my work on this, but I > > guess I'll just hijack this one. > > I knew this was on the cards but I have to say that I am surprised that > it is actually being pursued in this form. > > Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users > seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design. We've fought > long and hard to give GNOME 3 a consistent visual appearance, to make it > synonymous with a single user experience and to ensure that that > experience is of a consistently high quality. A general purpose > extensions and themes distribution system seems to threaten much of > that.
I think there's an important point missing here - unless we remove the extension feature altogether, there will be a distribution system for extensions. Right now, both Fedora and OpenSUSE (and possibly other distributions) have started packaging extensions - at least to me, this sends a strong message of officially endorsed enhancements, which is not at all what I think extensions are (or should be). So the question is not about having or not having a distribution system, it is about having a distribution system where we define the extension story, or having one where we don't. In the latter case, I wouldn't rely on others conveying that extensions are basically "hacks which void the warranty" rather than "cool stuff for the 1337" ... > One possibility for extensions would be to turn them into something more > akin to Google Labs - that is, something that is communicated and > structured as an experimentation ground, rather than a market place that > we encourage users to use (the very name 'extension' does just that). > The other nice thing about Google Labs is that the experimental nature > of the features it contains is clearly communicated. Doing this seems rather difficult if we let others shape the extension story (and I don't think renaming "extension" to "mod", "hack", whatever would help much). Communicating the experimental nature is best done in the distribution system - which is why I'd rather see GNOME designers and marketing people in charge of it. Florian _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
