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Managing GNOME shell extensions

Posted Sep 22, 2011 10:06 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Managing GNOME shell extensions by alogghe
Parent article: Managing GNOME shell extensions

Why wouldn't I just get these with the rest of the binary packages in my linux distribution?

Sadly no major Linux distribution provides a way to install software by and for one user. It has to be installed centrally. But desktop extensions, like web browser extensions, are something that individual users need to download and install without affecting other users or needing the root password.

The better answer would be to fix the package mechanism so that one person can 'yum install frozen-bubble', it goes in his or her home directory, and does not affect anyone else; but that's a much bigger problem to solve.

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Managing GNOME shell extensions

Posted Sep 22, 2011 19:53 UTC (Thu) by Corkscrew (subscriber, #65853) [Link]

I've always wondered why this is. Has anyone previously tried to add single-user install to the apt? What was the community response?

I realise that Debian is more aimed at big iron, but even there it could be useful. I have webspace and shell on a Debian server, and it is truly painful to do stuff like install Django from source. It would be nice to just have a command like "apt-get install --single-user django" and let magic happen.

Off the top of my head, obvious issues are:
- dependencies would have to be trackable on a per-user basis (which would also mean unprivileged users getting access to the system-wide dependency db)
- you'd need separate locations for system-wide vs per-user installation for every package (this would break some of them)
- per-user installations would have to be convertible to system-wide installations as and when the sysadmin got round to installing stuff

None of these seem insurmountable.

Managing GNOME shell extensions

Posted Sep 23, 2011 2:07 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I agree! This would be truly useful.

I'd hope the system would allow users to have their own dependency dbs layered on top of the system's. That way I could add (say) TenGen's MongoDB or Caffeine to my apt sources without affecting everyone on the system.

Packages would probably have to have some sort of indication that user-installable or not. It doesn't make sense to install the kernel into your home directory. Probably x.org too.

It might get weird if the user does a dist-upgrade before the machine admin. Or, if your idea of local installs automatically converting to system-wide ones works, then maybe everything just works.

Managing GNOME shell extensions

Posted Sep 22, 2011 22:57 UTC (Thu) by droundy (subscriber, #4559) [Link]

Why not simply allow users to enable or disable extensions?