DSH Plugin Ecosystem Manifesto

August 16, 2026 · View on GitHub

中文 | English

The DSH plugin ecosystem is growing quickly. The more plugins there are, the more their ability to work together matters: if every plugin assumes or even overrides another plugin's internals, installing a few plugins starts to conflict and the ecosystem fragments. This is nobody's fault — it is the natural result of missing shared conventions.

Our vision

We want to build an open, composable, and sustainable DSH plugin ecosystem:

  • Open: anyone can participate; official, desktop, and third-party plugins compose on the same platform as equals.
  • Composable: plugins extend against the same conventions, so they can be installed together and work together without interfering with each other.
  • Sustainable: upgrades stay backward compatible, so the ecosystem can evolve long-term without being rebuilt from scratch.

Three principles we advocate

  1. Composition first: compose capabilities through official slots, services, and patches; do not assume or override other plugins' internals.
  2. Declare clearly: state the services and slots you depend on; do not rely on runtime coincidences.
  3. Compatibility first: keep upgrades backward compatible and never break existing compositions.

The desktop shell is the first example

DSH Desktop is the first practitioner of this approach: the desktop shell itself is an ordinary DSH plugin on the same composition path as official and third-party plugins, with no special privileges. We did not fork upstream source into a fixed shell — we made "the desktop" an equal member of the plugin ecosystem.

A living document, built with the community

This manifesto is not a unilateral rulebook. It is a living document: it follows ecosystem practice and accepts community discussion and revision. Any author can propose changes through issues, discussions, or pull requests.

The plugin marketplace: making conventions the beneficial choice

Once the plugin marketplace ships, plugins that follow this manifesto will be easier to discover, install, and trust. We want convention-driven development to be the beneficial choice for every author, not an extra burden.

From a manifesto to a testable contract

DSH Community Fabric is turning this vision into a public Draft for manifests, capabilities, Host Descriptors, and events. It currently contains documentation only, not a released standard or runtime; plugins still use existing DSH and Cordis APIs today.

Fabric capabilities begin as compatibility, consent, and audit declarations. They do not present in-process JavaScript as a security sandbox. Only a Host with evidence of real isolation may claim technical permission enforcement.

The market is still in its product and safety design phase, with no usable page or installer yet. Catalog inclusion means that a project matched catalog rules; it is not a security review or endorsement.

How to participate