Facilitate manual install of extensions.

[seltzered]

This is just an enhancement idea for consideration.

Sometimes there's extensions that aren't up to date for the latest version of Gnome and one may want to manually install from source during development or a zip file. Would there be any usefulness in extension manager facilitating 'manual' installation of an extension?

This could at least by being a frontend to the gnome-extensions install of a zip file or directory location, such that one doesn't have to manually restart gnome shell, and facilitate removal as appropriate.

[mjakeman]

I like the idea and I've toyed with some kind of "Install from archive" option in the menu.

I'm not sure how we'd achieve this though - the flatpak sandbox intentionally prevents us from discovering which apps are present/not-present on the host system. I don't think we can call gnome-extensions install without poking a huge hole in the sandbox.

Another option is to reimplement installing from zip which isn't too hard, since it is a simple case of unzipping the extension to .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions. I think we can probably 'convince' Shell to load it by calling EnableExtension with whatever the extension name is.

Let's put this on the backlog (maybe for 0.5?)

[lheinke]

I would really appreciate this feature to be added. Perhaps it would even be possible to allow for imports & updates from GitHub directly by downloading the extension in the background, e.g. by pasting a link to the repo/release?