Official extensions badge

[andyholmes]

Hi, about a week ago I asked for "Get it on..." badge for extensions like Google Play has, so GNOME had their marketing designer Caroline Henriksen make an official badge for us. They asked if I'd contact a few extension developers to get the word out.

There is a PNG and SVG available that you can host yourself, possibly link from the GitLab issue, or I have a repository on Github you can link from (see the raw markdown from this comment for using SVG on Github).

Or just feel free to close the issue if you're not interested! Best of luck with your extension, I use this one myself ;)

[p-e-w]

So the GitLab issue you link to first asks me to log in ("you do not have permission"), then after doing so I get a 404. Indeed, the entire "marketing-design" repository appears to have either restricted access, or been removed.

Thus there is now no public record of where this badge actually comes from, no source file, no license. The existence of the badge is also not mentioned anywhere on https://extensions.gnome.org AFAICT.

I am so very tired of the neverending "official-unofficial" messages coming from GNOME concerning shell extensions. If you want people to use a badge:

• Announce it on an official channel
• Provide a stable link with source files, not a hidden/deleted GitLab issue
• Clearly explain licensing and usage guidelines
• Link to this info from the extensions website, to clearly demonstrate the official status of the effort

So far, this is half-baked at best. I don't do half-baked. Therefore, this issue is on hold until the above shortcomings are resolved.

[andyholmes]

Sure, I understand. Best regards.

[p-e-w]

Reopening. This issue is on hold, not closed.

To be clear, the above was not directed at you. I don't know who exactly to direct it at because it's unclear whether any individual or the GNOME project as a whole is responsible for these repeated failures to communicate properly with developers. I would have posted this in the linked GitLab issue, but alas, I can't access it :(

I applaud your efforts to make this badge happen, something which should have been there from the very beginning of shell extensions. And I'm quite surprised that GNOME actually responded to it, given how many requests are rejected or flat out ignored. But this type of initiative needs project-level support to be taken seriously. If they can't even be bothered to update the shell extensions website with a link to the badge it's hard to tell whether this badge is an official effort to streamline the developer experience, or just a well-meant proposal from someone who happens to work for GNOME.

I mean, they don't even host Gjs documentation on their own domain. At some point, I wish they would just announce that shell extensions are deprecated already, and save extension developers the constant wondering about whether they care at all.

[andyholmes]

Technically I would be the GNOME developer responsible for this. I was unaware the marketing repository had been moved, but I expected the attachment to become pruned at some point which is why I setup a small github repository to host it if that happened. Since the issue itself was closed, probably no one noticed the badge wasn't available anymore.

Unfortunately I don't have time available at the moment to follow up with extensions-web and submit a merge request for the badge to be distributed from that website. This was previously discussed on the now inaccessible issue, but was discouraged by a user who was concerned that extensions.gnome.org would be logging IPs and referrers, so nothing came of it at the time. I'll try and come back to this when I get some free time.

Sorry for the confusion.