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Can the extensions system be disabled?Can the extensions system be disabled?Posted Dec 5, 2011 14:48 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950)In reply to: Can the extensions system be disabled? by coriordan Parent article: extensions.gnome.org launches
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?
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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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