On 16/03/2015 11:55 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> GNOME3 has plenty of configuration options, set using dconf-editor.

GNOME 3 uses the gsettings system to hold its configuration settings. 
It's something like the Windows Registry, but harder to use. (E.g., it 
seems to be impossible to access when X11 isn't running. It's 
nightmarishly hard to configure settings for a user who isn't you. It's 
really hard to navigate without a GUI tool. And so on.)

Since OpenSUSE 13.1, gsettings likes to randomly revert certain settings 
every 103 reboots, for no defined reason. This is extremely unhelpful.

But the *most* unhelpful thing is that half the things you want to 
change DON'T HAVE SETTINGS! For example, there is no setting to bring 
back the minimise and maximise buttons; you have to install an extension.

But I guess that's a symptom of another worryingly common problem: GNOME 
3 is *clearly* designed to run on a tablet or a phone. Because nobody 
uses desktop PCs anymore, right? Right?? >_<

> Oh, and for creating gnome-shell extensions?
>
> https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Extensions
>
> Google with search terms "writing gnome 3 shell extensions".
>
> First hit.

Riiiight. Because I haven't already read that page 65,536 times. :-P

Basically, you write a shell extension by writing a JavaScript file that 
contains [at least] three functions with specific names. These functions 
work by MONKEY-PATCHING THE LIVE RUNNING CODE to make it do something 
different. The extension itself is responsible for reverting these 
changes when you disable the extension. (In particular, there are 
extensions that cannot be disabled, or don't disable properly.) Leaving 
this critical detail up to people who don't really know what they're 
doing and have no documentation to go by is... not optimal.

This, then, is how you write a shell extension. And how do you work out 
which part of THE ENTIRE SHELL CODEBASE you need to monkey-patch to make 
the changes you want?

You read the source code.

For the entire shell.

Because there's no documentation. Indeed, one Stack Overflow commenter 
helpfully commented that "there SHOULD be no documentation, because the 
source code is the documentation". No, random Internet user, the source 
code is not and will never be the documentation. Because the source code 
gives you the *implementation* not the *interface*.

Then again, when your entire extensibility platform is fundamentally 
based on purposely breaking encapsulation to start with...

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