[greasemonkey] [Greasemonkey] a difference in vision

[Michael Bierman]

I agree with everything said with two minor exceptions.  (really minor, I
think).

First, even if GM is focused on little annoyances (which seems perfectly
reasonable and appropriate to me), I much prefer to call up the editor of my
choice. Almost everyone will agree that their favorite editor is better than
everybody else's favorite editor so this makes everyone happy. 

Second, even if the purpose is ephemeral little scripts, I think it is fair,
and preferable to have a place to keep the original author's meta data
around.  Not only for credit's sake, but because sometimes someone might
want to ask the author something or other--I've done that several times and
the authors have been very kind to answer me.  I don't see any harm in
having that meta-data--but maybe I'm missing something here?

Cheers. 

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: greasemonkey-bounces at mozdev.org
[mailto:greasemonkey-bounces at mozdev.org] On Behalf Of Evan Martin
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 6:00 PM
To: greasemonkey at mozdev.org
Subject: [greasemonkey] [Greasemonkey] a difference in vision

[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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