Pausing (stopping?) TopIcons-Plus

[phocean]

Hi all,

I am sorry but I am going to take some distance with the development of this extension.

It is motivated by several things.

1. I have not used the extension myself recently. I use less and less extensions that use it. And among them, none of them breaks or looses functionality without the status icon.

2. The Gnome project does not give a shit about it and made it public. They even don't point to this extension but to an outdated, unmaintained one. Besides, Ubuntu, after making a survey, also moves on with its own extension.

3. Anyway, the API is dying. It will be dropped in the future with GTK updates. Documentation is sparse, so development requires considerable efforts for not much.
   As it is now, the API is also buggy and incomplete, so it is impossible to make a reliable extension or really enhance it. Of course, it will never be fixed.

4. TopIcons-Plus then became a magnet for claims (and exigences) that would better be addressed to the Gnome project. People fail to understand that the extension depends on an API and is not capable / intended to fix Gnome-Shell device. It is extremely exhausting.

5. The Gnome extension website is awful, as there is almost no maintainer there and validation takes sometimes weeks... Meanwhile, I get issues from disgrunted users...

So, I came to the conclusion, being also very busy with my job and my life, that the hassle is not worth it.
Especially when it requires considerable effort because of the sparse documentation.

Status icons are dead with Gnome-Shell. Move on and enjoy Gnome-Shell (as I am doing), or switch your desktop environment.

---

EDIT:

I received a lot of nice messages, so, first, many thanks ! Community is great and made that work a pleasure.

However, I see a lot of people worrying or talking of TopIcons-Plus as a dead thing that needs instant replacement.

The code is here, rather clean, and it is going to work for a while.
I may also make one or two releases if/when it is really necessary.
Just don't expect new features or great bug hunting.

Somehow, that has always been the point of TopIcons-Plus: filling the gap between nothing and long term solutions which will require code changes in many applications (AppIndicator or, better in my opinion, following the Gnome design with a daemon and notifications).

[davcri]

Thank you for your great work, I loved this extension 😄

[harry-cpp]

Ubuntu, after making a survey, also moves on with its own extension.

Its moving with the appindicator extension, which existed for a long long time now.

[csoriano1618]

The Gnome extension website is awful, as there is almost no maintainer there and validation takes sometimes weeks... Meanwhile, I get issues from disgrunted users...

I just reviewed & accepted your last revision. If you have any problem for a timely review of this extension in an eventual future revision, feel free to ping me.

It's really sad that this extension is going down now. I hope that you resume development in future or that someone else continues the project. Maybe we can all convince the GNOME developers to just get a little saner? I'm sure something can be worked out.

But I respect your decision and wish you all the best. I hope that sometime in the future we can make this work out again as the only other alternative extension is really really really really really buggy and practically doesn't work for any icons I use!

[r3b311i0n]

Oh well, it was great while it lasted. Thanks for all the hard work you did.

[phocean]

@ALL : Thank you for your feedbacks and encouragements !

See my EDIT for an answer.

@csoriano1618 : Thank you :-)

@phocean i think you are feeling the same as how I feel more-less about the recently change of gnome. In my case is worse i think, because my extension won't have support in wayland and some user think that i can fix this type of things, but none of them claim what they want directly to gnome, so i suppose also the gnome people will never do something as apparently the users won't want the features. I'm tired of reporting things, of which I have lost hope that they will be fixed.

Thanks for your hard work, is really a shame, but you can not take the role of a distro or a desktop, you are only one person.

Also to comment that one nautilus developer recommend to me the usage of your extension, if that count, some of then know about the hard and well done work that you make.

[parkerlreed]

Love what you have done with this project and wish you all the best!

[neffo]

@phocean thank you so much for this extension and the work you put in. It's always been one of the first installed after a fresh install.

@csoriano1618 is there a way to streamline the review process without adding too much risk to users? I'm aware that some changes are automatically approved (presumably adding languages, maybe UI). I think code review is important, but could this process be opened up to include reviews from the other extension developers as well? (With vetting.) Perhaps multiple reviewers per update?

@neffo maybe also add an attribute like urgent, medium, not transcendental, to then be possible get more priority to the urgent updates, because some peoples add sometime more than one update per day, and is clear that this is not easy to follow.

[neffo]

Yes, that is true. The moderators seem to review in reverse order though (and reject the older unapproved versions).

[sramkrishna]

@neffo I think we would be open for more people to participate in extension review. Ideally, I would like to see extension writer coalesce into forming a community and police themselves, provide documentation, tips and so forth. If someone wants to volunteer to be a community manager for GNOME extensions I would be happy to work with them.

@phocean referring to your second point, was there something we could have done better? We did reach out with a patch sometime prior to the announcement to get your feedback. I think on reddit, you said you could port it to Topicons Plus. Your feedback would be welcome.

As for point three - I have in fact talked with shell developers on documentation last GUADEC. But I need a volunteer who is willing to manage the extension community, ideally, if we can get extension writers together and help write the documentation that would help a lot. GNOME Shell/Mutter is a very complex codebase and requires a lot of care as you can imagine. I rather they focus on making Mutter/Shell the best it can be.

[csoriano1618]

@neffo oh this is the case already, reviewers are basically some of the extensions authors. You can imagine with 60 revisions from one day to another to review we have to be thankful for those extensions authors/reviewers doing the amount of work they are doing.

If you want to get involved, just go around #gnome-shell irc and ask some of those reviewers, after some time and trust you can become also a reviewer.

I agree we would be better if we had the infrastructure and process Fedora/Firefox/Chrome etc have for extensions or packages, but you can imagine it's not feasible for us...