Introducing GNOME 3.36: "Gresik"

[miker256 (mike royal)]

GNOME 3.36 is the latest version of GNOME, featuring changes from hundreds of contributors throughout the world.

[j_arun_mani]

Ok the improvement in icons and search seem weird to me, like I liked transparent background for search instead of semi-transparent panels kinda thing, all else are awesome

[SD_A (Steve)]

Why do extensions keep breaking with each Gnome version? I thought this had been stablized so extension devs wouldn’t have to fix their code for each Gnome release — As an end user this is pretty frustrating.

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

@SD_A

Why do extensions keep breaking with each Gnome version?

Because extensions are literally injecting code in the compositor, so any change in the internals of GNOME Shell may cause a breakage in the extensions.

@SD_A

I thought this had been stablized so extension devs wouldn’t have to fix their code for each Gnome release

That’s never been the case at all. Yes, the Shell has not been churning internals at a fast pace like it used to do 9 years ago when it was released, but the nature of how extensions work has never changed.

@SD_A

As an end user this is pretty frustrating.

Of course, and there are plans to improve the life of extension authors so that they can test beta releases of GNOME and update their extensions to deal with potential changes.

[SD_A (Steve)]

@ebassi

Of course, and there are plans to improve the life of extension authors so that they can test beta releases of GNOME and update their extensions to deal with potential changes.

Good to know — Is there a roadmap for this? I do appreciate all the work done on this amazing DE by the mostly volunteers, and which has been my daily driver since at least y2k.

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

@SD_A

Good to know — Is there a roadmap for this?

I’m fairly sure @sri can answer that question.

[sri]

Yes - so we have an initiative called “extensions rebooted” the goals are enumerated as follows:

1. build a sustainable community around extensions that is bonded with the gnome shell maintainers
2. centralize extensions around GNOME’s gitlab instance
3. be able to test gnome-shell against extensions near release period and document the breakage
4. build test suites for extensions

These are expansive. Today, we have only one simple goal - to be able to test one extension and see if it works - after that we can expand on all the above.

If you want to help and you have some good experience in ci pipelines or shell internals that would be wonderful as right now we are trying to figure out how that process works. Florian has written some tools that will help but we still need to build that toolchain.

If you are an extension writer, then we would welcome your input - we are tentatively scheduling a hackfest in May - but due to coronavirus issues that might be difficult and we’ll have to figure out something virtual to make this work.

Discussions and work are located at - https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/extensions-rebooted

We are excited about the project and its possibilities. Please feel free to read up. I would suggest that you try to understand what the project are, and the goals are. They may or may not align with your expectations.

If you have foundational issues because it doesn’t meet your expectations or desires, then I would suggest that you bring them to discourse rather than putting them in our issues list. Thanks.