Is panel plugins integration broken at the moment?

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Carol Spears schreef:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 01:23:08PM +0200, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> 
>>Carol Spears schreef:
>>...
>>
>>>>It seems the linker automatically looks for libaries in ${prefix}/lib 
>>>>when running binaries in ${prefix}/bin. This is not the case for plugins 
>>>>in ${prefix}/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins.
>>>>
>>>
>>>that is interesting.  i do not remember seeing that directory before any
>>>where.  i have one in /usr/local where xfce is but debian did not put
>>>one in /usr.  did it come from samba?
>>>
>>
>>This is getting a bit off-topic ;-) External plugins for the new panel 
>>are installed in ${prefix}/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins/. Some 
>>distributions define the libexec directory to be ${prefix}/lib/.
> 
> 
> this made sense to me if it was something from samba.
> 

I don't get this. What does any of this have to do with samba?

> i don't want to change an important root owned file like that for one
> application.  the only reason i would consider it is if i was installing
> something like samba to read acrossed file systems like i guess it does.
> 

Erm, xfce installs libraries. They need to be found by applications and 
by plugins. There are, as far as I know, two ways to do this:
1. add the appropriate directory to /etc/ld.so.conf
2. set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the appropriate directory

This is the same for both regular programs and external plugins. 
However, it seems that for regular programs, i.e. the ones installed in 
${prefix}/bin, the linker knows how to find the libraries in 
${prefix}/lib even without either of those settings. The problem is that 
for plugins this doesn't work, so what happens is this:

1. xfce4-panel works fine (it's in ${prefix}/bin)
2. the panel runs plugins in ${prefix}/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins, 
which fail. There is no warning to the user.

There also is no problem building the plugins, because pkg-config adds 
the appropriate linker flags during compilation.

That's it, nothing to do with samba or with doing something 
extra-special to make the panel work. The problem is that the panel 
doesn't fail in the same way that plugins do, which makes it much harder 
to understand for the user.

I hope this explanation made a little more sense ;)

	Jasper