history of CADT

Posted May 4, 2016 15:14 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: history of CADT by johannbg
Parent article: Devuan Jessie beta released

I view extension or "plugins" as highlighting underlying design deficiency ( the more extension people install or the higher usage of specific extension indicate something that should be the part of the default design since from my point of view people should not have to install extension or plugins to get the functionality they require from the desktop environment but providing the framework to overcome limitation of the desktop environment is not something I'm against ) so our opinion on that topic differ.

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out before the fact what functionality people would actually like to have. In that sense, providing an extension framework is like sowing a huge lawn in the town square and then later paving over those paths where people have been walking a lot, rather than paving a bunch of footpaths first and hoping that people will follow them and not walk on the grass. Similarly, the most popular extensions can then be made part of the core product.

It would be great if a large and complex piece of software like GNOME could be all things to all people from the get-go, but that's not what usually happens. In view of this, an extension framework is the next-best thing because it lets users scratch their itches in all the places that the original designers didn't foresee or didn't consider important. On the other hand, deliberately omitting basic functionality that is obviously desirable to a large proportion of known users, and relying on extension developers to put it back (which I hear is something the GNOME developers subscribe to – I'm not a GNOME user myself so don't have first-hand experience) is probably not the wisest approach.