[Greasemonkey] a difference in vision

[chris feldmann]

Exactly. 

If you make a script and make it public, cool. But let it go. If you find 
yourself making "versions," write it into an extension. Or use the Adrian 
Holovaty's greasemonky "compiler": 
http://www.letitblog.com/greasemonkey-compiler/. 

On 5/26/05, Aaron Boodman <zboogs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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