new panel and old plugins

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> 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?

This will break quite a lot of installations, but it saves us from 
thousands of complains from 4.0-upgraders. So, count me for `yes'. :-)

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

This has the advantage that the `workspace plugin' issue will be solved 
automagically by this as well.

regards,
Benedikt