What are the objectives for Xfce 4.4?

[edscott wilson garcia]

El vie, 04-02-2005 a las 14:59 +0400, Maarten Boekhold escribió: 
> Hi All,
> 
> One of the design goals I would like to see is a rework of the various 
> plugin interfaces. At the moment, the plugin interfaces do not work 
> correctly/completely on Cygwin, and due to Windows limitations they 
> cannot be made to work if we stick to the current design.
> 
> Some time ago I had a brief discussion with Jasper, and the idea came up 
> to populate a v-table in the application. This v-table would contain 
> pointers to all functions & variables inside the application that can be 
> called/used by the plugin. The v-table is passed to the module when the 
> module is loaded. Xffm uses something like this already (xfce4_combo, 
> xfce4_mime_icons etc.), although it does this the other way around (eg 
> it creates a v-table of functions in the plugin that xffm can call).

For plugins in xffm which are not meant to be shared with other
applications, in CVS I'm currently creating a vtable, not of function
pointers, but of symbol names. This resides in the main program. To
access any function I use the following simple routine:

G_MODULE_EXPORT
void *
function_pe( const gchar *librarydir,
const gchar *module_name, 
void *data,
const gchar *function_id)
{
    gchar *(*function)(void);
    module_info_t *module_info;
    if (!librarydir || !module_name || !function_id) return NULL;
    module_info=get_module_info(librarydir, module_name);
    if (!module_info) return NULL;
    if (!g_module_symbol (module_info->module_cm, function_id,(gpointer)
&(function)) ) return NULL;
    return (*function)(data);
}

Which allows me to query the plugin about it's capabilities.

> 
> I'll have to see how much time I can allocate to help out on this. If we 
> can come up with a nice project plan for this, the next release date 
> isn't too aggressive and we accept a temporary breakage of Xfce (we'll 
> need to break the existing plugin interfaces for a while until 
> everything has settled down), I might even be able to work on this...
> 
> As a very quick background: on windows you cannot have a plugin 
> reference a *variable* which is defined in the application that loads 
> the module (but it can reference a function).
> 

I see. But can the plugin reference a variable that is in a library that is 
dynamically linked to the program? 

Methinks it can, otherwise such common stuff as the
global variable "errno", which is defined in a dynamic library, would not be accessible
from plugins in cygwin. Is this the case?

 
regards,

Edscott

-- 
edscott wilson garcia <edscott at xfce.org>