Xfce 4.4BETA1 - core packages

[Benedikt Meurer]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>>You cannot unload thunar-vfs/thunarx/libexo, as they register static
>>GTypes. I was solely talking about loading, and I doubt that this
>>
>> xfdesktop -> thunar-vfs -> libexo
>> xfdesktop -> thunarx -> extension.so[LOCAL] [-> thunar-vfs -> libexo]
>>
>>is going to work w/o trouble with the various dlopen()/shl_load()
>>implementations on the supported platforms. You'll need to be very
>>careful to even make it work with glibc, not to mention the more exotic
>>platforms.
> 
> Well, the real problem comes into play if your "extension.so" above 
> pulls in a different version of something already loaded.  ELF is broken 
> that way.  Otherwise... I agree, it's messy.

I don't necessarily worry about ELF platforms (atleast the sane ones).
I'm more worried that this hack will not work at all on non-ELF
platforms, for example Cygwin comes to mind here, which uses PECOFF, or
Darwin/Mach-O, or "older" COFF/a.out based systems (for which shared
libraries are implemented as a hack, etc.). I'll try to support those
platforms as far as loading thunarx plugins goes, but I can impossibly
support thunarx/thunar-vfs/libexo itself as loadable plugins. You'll be
on your own there.

>>>I looked at relaytool, and it appears to do what I want, though it'll 
>>>only work on x86.  Not sure if it's worth the effort.  Since all the 
>>>thunar-vfs stuff is in only a couple files that won't get used at all if 
>>>thunar-vfs isn't available, I might just write my own wrapper that uses 
>>>GModule instead, so it should support all platforms.  Again, not sure if 
>>>it's worth the effort.
>>
>>GModule just uses dlopen()/shl_load().
> 
> Of course.  I was merely pointing out that relaytool only supports x86, 
> and from looking through it, only dlopen(), so using GModule would allow 
> it to work on any platform that glib supports, and hence any platform 
> Xfce supports.

What I meant is: Don't rely on consistent behavior of dlopen() across
platforms. GModule is just a very slim wrapper, and it doesn't abstract
the problem of the scenario described above. Even though it provides a
consistent API on different platforms, the semantics of such special
cases may (and will) still differ among the various platforms.

> 	-brian

Benedikt