new panel and old plugins

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> Marcel Pol wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> There seem to be problems with the new panel when it loads old plugins.
>> It tends to become really unstable when I run the new panel and place
>> all the 20 old plugins on it. The panel does print a message that it
>> would be a good idea to rebuild the plugin, but that alone isn't enough.
>> Imo one of the problems is that the panel in Xfce 4.1/4.2 loads
>> libxfcegui4.so.3 while old plugins load libxfcegui4.so.1. This reminds
>> me of the old libpng2 vs. libpng3 nightmare.
>>
>> Since I'm a downstream packager (Mandrakelinux) I'm thinking of solving
>> it by adding requires and conflicts to packages. The new panel conflicts
>> with old plugins, and new (rebuilt or really new) require the new panel.
>> This way people who mix and match packages (and people will do that)
>> cannot run into these problems.
>> Another way to resolve it would be upstream, and make the panel refuse
>> to load plugins that are compiled against the old panel, and against
>> libxfcegui4.so.1.
>>
>> To me both options are good enough, it's just that the first option
>> makes me do the work, and the second option makes an Xfce developer
>> work :-)
>> What do you think?
> 
> 
> We've discussed this on IRC already and it was decided that the panel 
> shouldn't refuse to load the plugins (because that way it would also 
> refuse to load BETA1 and BETA2, Jasper please correct me if I am wrong 
> here) but print a warning instead.
> 

Right, I didn't realize the lib soname had changed. People updating from 
4.0 will be a lot more common than people updating from 4.1.x, I guess, 
so it may be good to reconsider this.

Bumping the API version would solve the problems at the expense of extra 
work for people who installed 4.2 betas. Please, could some other devs 
share their opinion on this? Benedikt? Olivier?

	Jasper

PS
If we're going to do this, I'd advocate doing the same for the settings 
manager.