Write extension for gnome-shell 3.4 and 3.6

Question

I am writing an extension for gnome-shell. But in gnome-shell 3.4 a menu is added with panel._menus and in gnome-shell3.6 using with panel.menuManager. How I to add menu that work on every version?

Answer 1

There's a few ways you can do this.

You could check for the existence of panel._menus and use that if it exists, otherwise use panel.menuManager:

let menuManager = panel._menus || panel.menuManager
// now do everything with menuManager

Or you could explicitly check the gnome-shell version:

const ShellVersion = imports.misc.config.PACKAGE_VERSION.split(".").map(
   function (x) { return +x; }) // <-- converts from string to number
// this is now an array, e.g. if I am on gnome-shell 3.6.2 it is [3, 6, 2].

if (ShellVersion[1] === 4) {
    // GNOME 3.4, use panel._menus
} else if (ShellVersion[1] === 6) {
    // GNOME 3.6, use panel.menuManager
}