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Can the extensions system be disabled?Can the extensions system be disabled?Posted Dec 4, 2011 20:09 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544)In reply to: Can the extensions system be disabled? by ovitters Parent article: extensions.gnome.org launches
Installing software via my web-browser is is one worry, but maybe my bigger worry is actually in cutting the distros out of the system.
Package maintainers are the reason I trust software to do things such as playing nice with my other software, that the licence has been verified, that the uninstall option will do what it should.
In "non-distro-ised" operating systems (which are all proprietary), the lack of these things leaves systems in a mess. I hope free software doesn't migrate to non-distro-ised ways of distributing software. The ability to add a layer of verification is one of the advantages we have over proprietary software.
It would be great if the extensions could be put into the distros. They could be grouped into a number of bundles if the number is too large. At times they might be months out of date, but that's still clearly preferable in my book.
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Can the extensions system be disabled? Posted Dec 5, 2011 8:47 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Distributions can still package them. It is pretty much the same as Firefox. If you don't want to use this site then don't.
Can the extensions system be disabled? Posted Dec 5, 2011 13:10 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
But if the distros don't package them, then users have to either do without that functionality, or have a non-distro system with the problems I mentioned.
But that's just "if". Hopefully they will get packaged, just like Firefox extensions are packaged in Debian.
Can the extensions system be disabled? Posted Dec 5, 2011 14:48 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
So if you want your distro to package them, ask your distro to package them. There is not much difference between extensions.gnome.org and 'ftp.gnome.org' in that. It is provided on a site, but it is up to the distributions to package it and keep it up to date.
The difference in this case is that extensions.gnome.org provides an easy way to avoid the distro and see what has not packaged.
I get the impression you think providing a easier non-distro method is somehow a bad thing done by GNOME?
Can the extensions system be disabled? Posted Dec 5, 2011 19:56 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
"Bad" sounds malicious. I hope my comments don't sound like an attack. I'm more wondering if this direction is unwise.
If most/many users are installing stuff directly, then distros have less motivation to package and maintain that software. It seems likely that less software will go through the distro systems, and if that happens then I think free software will be undermining one of its big advantages.
By ftp, there's a power-sharing system. The GNOME devs decide the direction of the software, and the distros can exercise decisions such as when to migrate to the newest version, how it should be configured, what apps should own what mime types, etc.
The distros might seem to hold a lot of power there, but because there are many distros and they have to keep their users happy or lose them, the distros are kept in check too. The same isn't true for GNOME. There's only one set of developers I can get GNOME directly from.
With direct-install, there's no more power-sharing, no more review, no more testing to see if it plays nice with my non-GNOME software, no more need to worry about users going elsewhere etc.
(These issues would disappear if GNOME starts getting forked or if the direct-install repositories get forked, but such forks don't exist today, and we already have the distros which provide these services, so I'd rather support the distros than encourage multiple forks of GNOME.)
Could be a step in the wrong direction.
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