Re: Debian and the GNOME advisory board meeting
Hi Chris
On 02/07/2018 18:10, Chris Lamb wrote:
> (Specific and/or entirely-technical issues on the upstream bug tracker
> naturally would not be entirely appropriate unless you think I could
> help unblock them, of course.)
>
> So, yes, one provocative way of phrasing it might be... what sucks for
> you or our users about being downstream from Gnome or GTK right now?
> What is good..?
>
> Thank you very much for your input.
I've been meaning to file a bug for this, and I'm not sure weather it's
really an on-topic issue for the board, but it is squarely in the
category of something that really sucks badly on Gnome right now, and
that's how extensions to updates work, which is actually a big problem
in Debian.
A quick bit of background. If a user installs an extension from the
https://extensions.gnome.org website, it is installed under
~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions, when an updated extension from
the site is available, a notification is popped up prompting the user to
upgrade the package. So far, so good!
An administrator can also install a system-wide extension under
/usr/share/local/gnome-shell/extensions. Extensions installed here are
available system-wide for all users who wish to enable them. This is
also where we install extensions from Debian packages.
The problem is, when an extension is installed locally by a local
administrator or by a package, the user will still be prompted to
upgrade from the extensions website when a newer version is available
from there, which leads to a bunch of problems, firstly that a user can
be upgraded to a newer package with new bugs or that just isn't that
well supported on stable anymore. Also, in a corporate environment I
might have custom extensions installed that will then be upgraded to
versions from the shell-extensions site.
It would be great if there was better support for locally installed
packages, at least being able to disable extensions.gnome.org updates
for system-wide installed extensions would be good start. It would at
least put users at lower risk of breakage and malicious updates.
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
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