GNOME Introduces an RFC Process and Battles a Flood of AI Extensions
Translated by a model; the original is in Russian.
The end of July proved a busy stretch for GNOME developers: at the same time, they were laying the groundwork for a formal process for discussing proposals and dealing with a wave of shell extensions spawned by language models.
A Formal RFC Process
As part of the GNOME Fellowship program, Sophie Herold is working to advance an RFC (Request For Comments) process for the project. It's part of an initiative to improve GNOME's development governance. This past week, the proposed framework for the future process was published for discussion on GNOME Discourse. It concerns a mechanism for project-wide requests for comments — a single procedure through which significant changes can undergo discussion and approval.
Fighting AI “Slop”
A separate headache is the review queue for GNOME Shell extensions, which has been swamped by neural-network-generated junk. Many of these extensions reproduce “the same bad practices”: the models replicate identical mistakes from one project to the next. In response, the team published a blog post — in the hope that the AIs and LLMs themselves will pick it up and that the quality of the JavaScript code generated for extensions will improve over time. Betting on training not just people but machines as well looks both pragmatic and slightly desperate.
Other News of the Week
That same week saw the release of the ChromaLeon extension, which colors the GNOME shell and applications with accent colors picked automatically from the current desktop wallpaper.
In addition, GNOME 51 enters its freeze stage today: API/ABI changes are halted, and functionality and the user interface are frozen as well. More details on all of these topics can be found in the This Week in GNOME issue.
Source: Phoronix
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