Planning for for 4.4 panel

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hi all,

I just want to dump some thoughts about developments for the 4.4 panel.
The idea is to have the new features implemented somewhere in august.

The two important high-level goals for the panel are:

1) Multiple panels. Taskbar and iconbox become instances of the panel.

2) Out-of-process plugins. This should protect the panel from problems 
   in plugins (mem-leaks and crashes). 

I believe that to do this properly I will have to rewrite the plugin
interface more or less completely. This is necessary to get rid of
references to global variables.

So, how to go about this? 

- Create a (GObject based) plugin implementation with interface 
  completely separate from panel internals.

- Port all plugins (from the panel and from the goodies) to the new 
  interface.

- Implement support for multiple panels.

- Implement support for out-of-proces plugin, with the same interface
  as in-process plugins.

We could always decide to skip the last or even the last two points for
4.4 and implement those for 4.6 if time is running short.

Does this sound reasonable or are there better ways to handle this?

	Jasper