new panel and old plugins

[Erik Harrison]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:20:46 +0100, Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at xfce.org> 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?

I'm just a user, but I've been running CVS and betas since prior to
4.0. If you're going to break something, break it on a minor release,
I don't mind the extra work when switching between beta releases. Cuts
down on phony bug reports.

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

Please do. The Workspace Settings plugin showing up has been mentioned
three or four times here - I submitted it as a bug a few months ago.
This'll keep a flood from opening up after release.

-Erik
> 
> 
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-- 
-Erik