[Greasemonkey] a difference in vision

[Aaron Boodman]

Wow. Evan paints a pretty dire picture.

I think the situation is somewhat less disastrous. Yeah gm is being
used in ways I didn't forsee. But that's pretty cool. True, I think
people are trying to build too much robustness into something
fundamentally balanced on shifting soil, but hey people can do what
they want.

I cannot deny, I disagree with some (ok many) of the bells and
whistles people want to add. But hey, I'm entilted to my opinion.
Those who know me know that I tend to be somewhat of a

> minimalist nazi

, but it's all good. I can be convinced. Just not with "everyone else
does it" and "duh, can't you see" arguments. And hey, if you really
really really must have attribution for your thirty line user script
show up in the UI, branch Greasemonkey and create your own. It's open
source, yo.

-- 
Aaron

On 5/26/05, Evan Martin <evan.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> [Disclaimer: my opinions are derived from hanging out and talking with
> Aaron but he hasn't vetted this mail.  But he's also too nice to write
> this email, so I get to do it!]
> 
> I think the original vision for Greasemonkey was that user scripts
> would be tiny, ephemeral things; quick hacks that are passed around
> and that break as site owners change their sites.  The analogy was
> shell scripts -- you write them once to solve your task and then you
> forget about them, or if you share them, you share them as a snippet
> of code in an email and not as complicated .tar.gz download.
> 
> Somehow along the way people began using Greasemonkey for something
> else: complicated and tricky modifications that reached deep into a
> site.  Those are cool, with "far-reaching implications" and all of
> those nice phrases people like to post to their blogs about.  But
> they're complicated, and there are already provisions in Mozilla for
> distribution, versioning, and autoupdate.  They're called extensions.
> 
> This is why Aaron wanted to integrate a script editor -- not because
> of feature creep, but because a script is something you do immediately
> when a page annoys you.  Or you take someone else's script that makes
> a textbox 600px wide and you tweak it to make it 800px wide.  This is
> why a author tag doesn't fit in -- because by their very nature the
> scripts are derivative of someone else's work anyway and somebody
> farther down the road will continue to change them.  It's 20 lines of
> obvious code, why are we worrying about copyright and licensing of
> derivative works?
> 
> With all of that said, I there's obviously place in the world for the
> Lickrs and the Book Burros, and maybe the solution isn't converting
> all of them to extensions.  But as everyone sits here and tries to
> figure out ways to embed HTML and images and more metadata into their
> single file of javascript I can't help but point out that there's an
> easy way to package disparate data together: it's called tar.
> 
> How do you reconcile these views?  I see two options:
>  - creature feep Greasemonkey into extensionmanager++; or
>  - fork Greasemonkey into a bigger brother (I proposed to Aaron
> "Greaseape", but that's lame) that does extension management with
> signing and author metadata and tarballs and autoupdates and XUL
> hacking and menu commands and preference panes.
> 
> I don't much like either of them, but I don't see any other options.
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