[GoLUG] LOL, people wonder why I don't like the Gnome project

[Barry Fishman]

On 2023-09-07 17:07:07 -04, Alex Finkel wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-09-07 at 14:25 -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>> https://fossforce.com/2023/09/why-your-favorite-extension-might-not-work-with-gnome-45/
> I think is is only going to be an issue for poorly maintained or
> unmaintained extensions.
>
> While I am not a developer, from reading the porting guide it does not
> seem to be a huge lift to make the necessary changes.
>
> https://gjs.guide/extensions/upgrading/gnome-shell-45.html#esm
>
> https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2023/09/02/extensions-in-gnome-45/
>
> The biggest issue seems to be needing to support mutiple versions of an
> extension for pre and post v45.

It seems that Gnome 45 is not unique in that plugins have to be updated
for every release.  I usually get Gnome updates fairly quickly (running
an unstable OS) and it usually means all the plugins immediately fail.
Usually I can get by just editing their metadata.json file to include
the new version number in "shell-version", but it sometimes involves
other API changes.

On nice aspect of these plugins is they are JavaScript so they are
source files sitting under ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions.

If they don't work, the error messages are printed in the journal log,
and you can fix them by just editing them in place.  The documentation
about changes is pretty good, so even someone like myself that usually
avoids JavaScript can make simple changes.

Unfortunately Gnome otherwise continues to break real functionality with
each major release, and although I have re-written most of my GTK3 apps,
to work with GTK4, the GTK3 versions are far nicer to use.

-- 
Barry Fishman