[Discuss] Gnome Shell

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

When Gnome 3 came out, I was a bit disappointed, but I was able to
obtain some really cool extensions from Finnbarr Murphy.  There
extensions allowed me to customize Gnome 3 to add things like a shutdown
command on the menu, and a few other nice things. Unfortunately the
Gnome developers have made the API a moving target. Every release of
Gnome 3 has required significant changes to the Javascript extensions.
And even FinnBarr is giving up. He has a very nice page on the
architecture. If you look at his latest blog: http://blog.fpmurphy.com/,
--
"Fairly major changes were required to make it work with GNOME 3.4. I do
wish that the GNOME developers, most of whom appear to be young with
little real practical world experience and who do not seem to understand
the business need to preserve backwards compatability, would stop
randomly changing APIs and functionality for no good reason. For
example, Jasper St. Pierre removed support for tooltips in GNOME 3.4 in
February 2012. See GNOME Bug 670034. His excuse:

StTooltip has been plagued by lots of issues, and we recently ditched it
in the dash. Remove it for good.

As a result, many of my GNOME Shell extensions require major rework to
work with GNOME Shell 3.4. No consultation with end users, no attempt to
fix the problems, no marking interfaces as deprecated for a release or
two. Just remove the facility and let consumers of the facility rework
their code. No wonder the GNOME Shell designers and developers are
getting such a bad rap. By the way, look at the Cinnamon codebase, they
fixed tooltips so that they work correctly.

This is the last release of the GNOME Shell that I will be releasing my
extensions on. I simply do not have the time or inclination to rework my
codebase everytime a young and usually inexperienced (in terms of years
of software development) developer that is a member of the GNOME Shell
cabel decides to reinvent facilities for no particularly good reason."
--

Basically in my 40 years as a software developer, I have always
respected backward compatibility. In the Digital Unix group they would
stand us up before a firing squad if we even suggested to break
backwards compatibility. (I got away with it once because of standards
compliance). I can certainly empathize with Finnbarr (who BTW has spoken
at the BLU a few times).

In my own case, that means If I want to keep using these extensions, I
will either have to maintain them myself or maybe switch to KDE.


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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