Is panel plugins integration broken at the moment?

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Fabian Nowak wrote:
> 
> regarding the following points:
> 
> - generally, noone has ...libexec in his ld.s.conf or LD_LIBRARY_PATH,

True, but it's not necessary to have libexec in ld.so.conf or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  Those two things are to tell programs where to find
*libraries*.  The new panel doesn't store libraries in libexec.  It
stores programs.

> - no other desktop systems use libexec,

Totally incorrect:

$ ls /usr/libexec/g*
/usr/libexec/gconf-sanity-check-2*   /usr/libexec/gnome-keyring-ask*
/usr/libexec/gconfd-2*               /usr/libexec/gnome-pdf-viewer*
/usr/libexec/gdict-applet*           /usr/libexec/gnome-pty-helper*
/usr/libexec/gdmaskpass*             /usr/libexec/gnome-vfs-daemon*
/usr/libexec/gdmopen*                /usr/libexec/gnome_segv2*
/usr/libexec/gdmtranslate*           /usr/libexec/gthumb-catalog-view*
/usr/libexec/ggv-postscript-viewer*  /usr/libexec/gthumb-image-viewer*

Looks like gnome uses it for quite a few things, and I don't have the
entirety of gnome installed.

> - adding $prefix/lib to ld.so.conf is already necessary for even the old
>   panel,

Well, if you install it to a non-system location, of course it is.  What
else would you expect?

> - installation instructions on xfce-goodies wiki site already contain 
>   the third point and would be blown having another sentebnce saying "if
>   you run panel 4.4, which can be found out by typing [...] add 
>   libexec",

Irrelevant and unnecessary.  See my first point.

> - some documentations say libexec was deprecated,

Please provide the URL of an authoritative source that states this.
Even then, this isn't really relevant.  If a distro packager (or user)
wants to, they can simply provide --libexecdir= to configure.

> i suggest switching to $prefix/lib for the panel plugins location for
> ease of use which is one of Xfce's main principles. this would also
> decrease the amount of "the plugin ... is not shown" mails on the
> mailing lists.
> i know that all ported plugins would need to be changed in their
> configuration files for another configuration path and don't mind doing
> that for my plugins and would also do that for other plugins where
> necessary.

Sorry, but quite frankly you've misinterpreted the problem and don't
have a clue as to what you're talking about.

At any rate, I just looked at 'libtool --mode=link --help', and I think
the solution here is to add "-R$(libdir)" to LDFLAGS in our Makefile.am.
 I'm not 100% sure if this needs to be done for the external plugins
themselves, or for libxfce4panel, or both.  That should hardcode a
libdir in the executable itself, so it'll search in the right place
regardless of ld.so.conf or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (but should still fall back
on these if it can't find the library).

	-brian
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