Bug#888939: gnome-shell-extensions: needs a plan for what will happen to "icons on the desktop" in GNOME >= 3.28

[Simon McVittie]

Package: gnome-shell-extensions
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
X-Debbugs-Cc: gnome-flashback at packages.debian.org, nautilus at packages.debian.org
Control: affects -1 nautilus gnome-flashback

The version of Nautilus in GNOME 3.28 is not going to draw desktop icons
(files and folders). This matches the default behaviour in GNOME since
3.0, but GNOME Classic relies on non-default support for drawing desktop
icons, which is now being removed.

In desktop environments and environment variants where this functionality
is required, like GNOME Classic and perhaps GNOME Flashback, there are
a few possible options:

* use one of the various forks of Nautilus, like Cinnamon's Nemo, to draw
  the desktop icons
* use a new GNOME Shell extension like
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/csoriano/org.gnome.desktop-icons
* some new cut-down fork of Nautilus 3.26 that *only* draws the desktop
  and does not display as a normal window

Patching "draw the desktop" back into Nautilus is probably not an option:
the reason it's being removed now is that it's holding back development
of Nautilus' main purpose (a window-based file browser).

If this feature is important to you, now is the time to be thinking about
solutions that can be maintained by people who want icons on the desktop,
without putting a maintenance burden on people who don't. This should be
done upstream (possibly by interested developers creating a new upstream
project that draws desktop icons in a style similar to Nautilus 3.26)
rather than in Debian, and should probably involve the upstream
maintainers of the GNOME Classic mode.

    smcv
    (not intending to work on this myself)