Internal panel plugins vs. FHS

[Christoph Wickert]

Hi all,

there is a serious bug in the design of internal xfce4-panel plugins. A
plugin needs a desktop fine in /usr/share/xfce4/panel-plugins. That's
fine for external plugins, but for internal ones this causes a problem:
The X-XFCE-Module path is in that file and refers to $(libdir), which is
architecture specific.

You may ask: Why is this a problem?
     1. It's a violation of the FHS which clearly states:
        "The /usr/share hierarchy is for all read-only architecture
        independent data files" [1]
     2. On Fedora we support mulitarch systems. You can install and run
        both 32 and 64 bit programs and libs. This is very handy for
        development. rpm will allow a files to belong to more than one
        package as long as they match, but if they are different, rpm
        will report a file conflict and abort the operation.

I already mentioned this while talking to Nick at FOSDEM, but it was
only in passing and to much late to fix it in 4.6. For 4.8 this issue
really should be addressed.

Two options I could think of:
     1. Move the desktop files to $(libdir). That's what we currently do
        in Fedora.
     2. Move the internal plugins to $(libexecdir) like the external
        ones.

Ideas, opinions?

Regards,
Christoph

[1]
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREARCHITECTUREINDEPENDENTDATA