xfce4-notes bug disrupts panel

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Angelina Carlton wrote:

>I realize that xfce4 notes is part of the goodies package and I added
>a comment to an exisiting bug at the goodies bug tracker, however it 
>seems it might affect xfce4-panel also.
>
>Xfce4-notes will choke if your note contains a special character like
>'&' 
>  
>
Just a random guess, but, assuming the config file is XML, I'd bet 
someone forgot to call g_markup_escape_text() before writing note data 
to the file.  The '&' character is special in XML and needs to be 
escaped.  Granted, it occurs to me that I can't see why this would cause 
a crash.

>if I type a note "apples & oranges" the next time I login, notes wont
>load, but worse, my entire panel wont load. Does the panel not have 
>a check for broken plugin?
>
It isn't really possible to do such a check.  To the panel, plugins are 
black boxes.  Because plugins run in the same process space as the 
panel, they can do all manner of evil things to it (even accidentally), 
and there isn't much the panel can do about it.

>Its easy to fix by editing the notes config file directly but want to 
>let someone know about the panel not loading.
>  
>
As you might guess at this point, the only solution to this is to fix 
the notes plugin.

/me kicks the notes plugin maintainer

    -b