The asynchronous nature of extension loading, session loading, and more,
makes the code racy as to what is initialized first, and hard to debug.
Additionally, since gjs is single-threaded, the only code we're running
in a thread anyway is readdir, which is going to be I/O bound, so the
code here is actually likely to be faster.
Drop this in favor of some good old fashioned synchronous loading.
gnome-shell-extension-prefs supports opening a specific extension's
preferences directly from the command line by passing the UUID.
However this broke when extension loading was changed to be processed
asynchronously, as no extension has been loaded when the command
line argument is processed. Fix by deferring opening the extension's
preferences until all extensions have been loaded.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694858
This allows us to move to a file-monitor based approach in the future.
Since we need signals, we convert the current set of functions to an
object we attach signals too, leading to the new ExtensionFinder object.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677586
The "extension" object is what I previously called the "helper" object.
It contains the extension importer object as well as the metadata object.
Things that were previously added on to the metadata (state, path, dir, etc.)
are now part of this new "extension" object.
With the new importer changes brought on by the extension prefs tool,
extensions are left without a way to import submodules at the global scope,
which would make them rely on techniques like:
var MySubModule;
function init(meta) {
MySubModule = meta.importer.mySubModule;
}
That is, there's now a lot more meaningless boilerplate that nobody wants
to write and nobody wants to reivew.
Let's solve this with a few clever hacks.
Allow extensions to get their current extension object with:
let extension = imports.misc.extensionUtils.getCurrentExtension();
As such, extensions can now get their own extension object before the
'init' method is called, so they can import submodules or do other things
at the module scope:
const MySubModule = extension.imports.mySubModule;
const dataPath = GLib.build_filenamev([extension.path, 'awesome-data.json']);
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668429
A new tool, 'gnome-shell-extension-prefs' can load a new entry point from
extensions, 'prefs.js', which has an entry point to return a GTK+ widget.
This allows extensions to have their own preferences dialog, without each
extension needing to ship its own Python script and .desktop file.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668429
