It’s more than 2 months main extensions repository is without a maintainer. Here are waiting 120+ updates and new extensions for the review.
I think it’s very important to fix it soon as possible
A majority of Gnome users think Gnome Shell without Extensions and customization useless.
Sometimes extensions have issues and need fixing. Especially, when extensions are a part of main thread and can directly affect Gnome shell performance, resources and user experience.
Gnome could lose Developers if they are not feeling feedback, support and can lose users (testers, contributors).
Now not all Gnome users are software or hardware engineers to them is too much install/update/check some parts from sources.
Yes, sadly this is a problem. The plan I had envisioned was creating a self sustaining community. We need someone to take charge and manage all the extensions. That unfortunately cannot be me as I don’t know javascript all that much. We need about 5 people who are willing to step up and look at the extensions and approve them after making sure there is nothing malicious in the code.
Extension writers should support each other and build documentation. In short we need a dev relations person who can do all this. Great experience for those who want to get into this kind of work in a corporation.
GNOME Extensions are VITAL part of all DE. It’s like ALL philosophy around Gnome Shell is JUST JS extensions.
And when that vital part without maintainer even one for months it’s an issue.
I don’t think somebody serious could maintain 1k extensions, be mentor a mentor for some community around, write docs for free.
Also extensions developers are doing a lot for all infrastructure. I could say as a gnome extension developer I reported bug reports and patches to many projects like Gtk, LibSoup, GJS, Gnome Shell etc.
We’re losing not just extension developers and users but main contributors to the project too.
We’re celebrating the 3.32 release!? But any extension couldn’t update even version to it or publish an fixes for it!
Hi @konkor - I think what @sri is saying is that there is indeed an issue here, and we all recognise it. The issue is around finding people to do the work in reviewing the extensions. Personally, I’d like to see a more automated way of doing this, but we just don’t have the infrastructure or people in place to do this.
Oh. Don’t get me wrong. I just wanted to get attention to that issue and maybe together we could find a solution (people, resources, topics for discussions on events etc). This issue exists years.
A solution can only be solved if we have resources. If you know other extension coders then let’s help try to reach out. One good step, is to get everyone to move their extensions to git.gnome.org. Let’s centralize the development. Can you do that and encourage others to do it?
If you want automation, then we need to move everyone to the GNOME infrastructure so that we can actually create such automation and apply it universally.
You don’t need gjs devs, they are already here. We need extension authors.