Gnome Shell Themes fail

[DBelton]

aaa yup.. your extensions got packaged and included in the Fedora repo. I thought you knew about it, but obviously you didn't.

But, since they are extensions, they won't be show stoppers and they aren't actually included on the release media. I do agree that possibly there should be some system set up on the extensions in the repo that make certain they are updated along with the gnome shell, or at least a quick way to see if an extension was updated.

Possibly a gnome shell version in the Summary info for the extension so that it will show what version it was written for??

[LightDot]

Spec files for extensions should simply have Requres: that limits them to an appropriate gnome-shell version. So, >= 3.2 and < 3.3 for this round of extensions... Wouldn't this solve problems?

It would make the maintainer change the spec for the next version of Gnome Shell and he/she would probably also recheck the actual compatibility of the code. Or am I being too optimistic?

[fpmurphy]

In theory yes.

But here is a case of somebody who packaged a number of GS extensions, never bothered to tell the developer that they were packaging them, and then failed to ensure that the packages were updated to work on F16 or not made available for F16. Who gets the nasty emails - the developer.

[DBelton]

Good point, fpmurphy.

I had noticed on your site that you stated you wouldn't be updating your extensions until after the 3.2 release of gnome shell, so I wasn't expecting them to be kept up to date in the repo. But, a lot of people haven't even seen your site so wouldn't know about that.

All they know is that the package is available in the repo, and it doesn't work. So, as you stated, the developer gets the blame (and the nasty emails).

I still don't see a good solution to this, either.

1: Make the extension dependant upon certain gnome shell version, then you get broken dependancies.
2: Keep the current system, then you get broken extensions

About the best solution I can think of is to specify in the summary info for the package exactly what versions of gnome shell that it would work with, and leave it up to the user to decide if they want to try it or not if the versions don't match up. (Some do, some don't, and some will just by changing the version in the metadata file, others will crash gnome shell if you try that)

[LightDot]

Yea, I agree that such cases are even more problematic. I'm sure the packager had the best intentions but things went awry a bit. So such situations don't do any good for anybody, the developer, the packager, users or even Gnome and Fedora's public image. It's odd how such relatively small things can get a lot of attention... and a lot of eyes/blogs are pointed this way right now.

Perhaps such a limiting Requires: section should be made mandatory for Gnome Shell Extensions? It would help all interested parties.

Edit: just saw DBelton's post. Ok, perhaps making Requires: mandatory is a bit too restrictive. But I guess broken dependencies would make package maintainers get bug reports aka. reminders sooner.

[DBelton]

true.

broken dependencies would go back to the packager rather than the developer if a bug report was filed.

So maybe it would be a solution. Go up the chain, so to speak. The packager gets the broken dependency report, then he must figure out the solution. If that means going on upstream to the developer, then it would be up to him to do so. It would prevent out of date extensions in any case. Either the packager would have to change the dependencies, or go to the developer to change the extension.

In this case, it probably would have prevented the broken packages being in the repo without the developers knowledge. (unless the packager puts too wide a range on the gnome shell versions that it depends on.)

[LightDot]

Ah, excellent. While I was sorting out my gnome-shell-extension-weather rpm (which is a nice extension, now that's working), some updates started trickling in on updates-testing. These:

gnome-shell-extension-user-theme-3.1.4-2.fc16.noarch
gnome-shell-extension-common-3.1.4-2.fc16.noarch
gnome-shell-theme-atolm-1.0-1.fc16.noarch
gnome-shell-theme-smooth-inset-1.0-1.fc16.noarch

were replaced by:

gnome-shell-extension-user-theme-3.2.0-1.fc16.noarch
gnome-shell-extension-common-3.2.0-1.fc16.noarch
gnome-shell-theme-atolm-3.2-1.fc16.noarch
gnome-shell-theme-smooth-inset-3.2-1.fc16.noarch

and all of a sudden, I too have themes working in gnome-tweak-tool. Thanks to whoever got these trough to the repositories. It's definitely nice to have this sorted out before or at least soon after the final release...

[leigh123linux]

I just grabbed some extensions





Now I think I've completed the theme for now (borrowed from Mint 12).

[Dan]

Hmmmm.

You wouldn't happen to have retained that package? <....>

[Mitsakos]

Guys I have a problem with weather in 3.2...

It cannot load the extension..
Any tips?

[Dan]

Uhm, yeah. Wait for fpmurphy to get the extensions properly fixed for Gnome 3.2. He will post here as soon as he's got them done, I think.

[leigh123linux]

Hmmmm.

You wouldn't happen to have retained that package? <....>

Make sure you have no fedora extensions first.

su
yum erase gnome-shell-extension*
yum install gnome-shell-extension-user-theme gnome-tweak-tool --enablerepo=u*g

Then copy as root (the files in the tarball).

extensions live in /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions

Mint-Z in /usr/share/themes/Mint-Z

[leigh@localhost ~]$ ls /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions 
alttab@linuxmint.com        notifications@linuxmint.com
bottompanel@linuxmint.com   shutdownmenu@linuxmint.com
ibus-indicator@example.com  smartoverview@linuxmint.com
mediaplayer@linuxmint.com   user-theme@gnome-shell-extensions.gnome.org
menu@linuxmint.com          windowlist@linuxmint.com
noa11y@linuxmint.com        xrandr@linuxmint.com
[leigh@localhost ~]$ ls /usr/share/themes/Mint-Z/
gnome-shell  gtk-2.0  gtk-3.0  metacity-1  panelbg.png  unity
[leigh@localhost ~]$

[YeOK]

Nice find leigh123linux, managed to find out how to replace activities text from that. It is about the only thing I hate about Gnome-shell.

[tuxdude]

Thanks for the pointer Leigh, nice to have a bit more control of my desktop
The mint guys seem to be listening to their users
Thanks again
Dave

[nihlathak]

not function,no selectable in tweak tool.only yellow triangle.

---------- Post added at 07:06 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:41 AM ----------

not enable themes extension.sorry