On 6 October 2014 13:26, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh@redhat.com> wrote:
Well, if this was an extension maintained by GNOME developers (like the
extensions that produce Classic Mode) I think that would be less of an
issue. I like the idea of making this an extension because (obviously)
other GNOME distros would not want to be using ask.fp.o for their
questions.

That said, I'm not sure exactly how the search extensions work; they may
be a more stable API than the gnome-shell extensions. Someone who
understands that better is welcome to chime in here :)

Shell extensions that provide search capabilities all broke (again?) with the release of GNOME 3.12 when some major refactoring was done to Shell's search sub-system. It looks to me that the API for extensions to register as search providers has been neglected a bit: there are some Shell functions that were broken the last time I looked and had been for quite some time.

The implication is that the preferred way to implement a search provider now is to build an app that implements a SearchProvider interface (over D-Bus) and can be launched via D-Bus. How stable the interface is I don't know, but I'd imagine that implementing a search provider this way is less likely to break with each GNOME release since messaging via D-Bus is that little bit further removed from plugging-into Shell's JavaScript API.

--
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."