After updating my FreeBSD box to GNOME 3.14, I wasn't able to load the places menu gnome-shell extension. Using Looking Glass to get at the error message, I saw I was getting "Error: Argument 'path' (type utf8) may not be null".

After sprinkling global.log() calls all over this extension's source code (it would have made my life a lot easier if gnome-shell was showing an actual stack trace along with line numbers...), I was finally able to locate the issue.

The Glib.get_user_special_dir() function may legitimately return null when the XDG user directories are not setup, and the code simply doesn't handle that case. After configuring those directories properly using the xdg-user-dirs-update tool, everything was fine.

While such a situation isn't likely to happen for many people since most of them use Linux distributions that already come with these things configured (or so I assume), I believe this extension should properly handle such a case, just skipping over those special directories if they cannot be found.

The patch is extremely trivial and involves changing the "if (specialPath == homePath)" condition on line 205 of placeDisplay.js to "if (specialPath == null || specialPath == homePath)", such that we not only skip special directories if they point to the home directory, but also if we get a null. For what it's worth, this line number I'm giving here is still correct for the source code in the git repository, at the time of this writing.