GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 709476
Application add-on support is missing
Last modified: 2014-07-02 23:21:15 UTC
There are a couple of application that distributes plugins/addon for extending the core software functionality. Pidgin for example has plugins for extending the account/feature support, the same applies to Evolution which distributes an EWS package. Currently gnome-software does not support those addons. I really like the concept of Google Play Store or Ubuntu Software Center where the addons are listed inside the application overview. So you know exactly that this plugin/addon is for the shown application and is not listed as an own "application". See: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/new-ubuntu-software-center-feature.html Can you please add such support?
Thanks for the suggestion. Outside of browsers, I'm not entirely sure that we want to be encouraging apps to use addons, tbh. They add extra work installation and configuration, and they are the perfect way to avoid making real decisions about your application's design. That said, this might be necessary for those apps that do provide packaged add-ons, if we want to enable people to fully avoid the command line. I think the question is - which apps and which types of addons? * It would be a really bad idea to reproduce existing app addon UIs, like the Firefox one. * This could also get really ugly if an app has a very large number of addons. How many addons are we designing for? * In Software we have the concept of OS addons. Is there any potential overlap with addons? (That would be bad.)
To name a few applications that makes use of addons/plugins: * claws-mail has several plugins for spamfilter, notifications and s/mime support, ... * Pidgin has plugins for new protocols, notifications, encryption, ... * Evolution has extensions for different Exchange Servers * Nautilus extensions * gedit plugins... * Fritz Fun has several plugins for adding different address books, sound servers * GNOME shell itself has several extensions * geany, remmina, ... These are plugins that are not installed through the application but through the typical package manager. Those applications than offers a UI which lists all plugins which can be enabled. So its a common way to extend a core software functionality with a plugin/addon as not every feature is required for every user. I think it is mandatory that these addons/plugins are supported within GNOME software to improve the user experience. Beside that: This is a feature most of the typical users are used to (see Android/iOS/OS X platforms).
I've added support for this today in appstream-glib and also createrepo_as -- I've blogged about what application authors have to do here: http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2014/06/11/application-addons-in-gnome-software/ Kalev is working on the UI side, we'll show some screenshots when we've got the actual wirerames from Allan.
The add-on UI landed last week in https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-software/commit/?id=3cc3e2ca6d72e01010b16a6c4a30353d6ff2fad2