System values for panel plugins with Xfconf

[Matias De lellis]

Hi Graeme,
Sorry for the great offtopic and not answering your question. :)

> But how are the distros able to ship defaults for the plugins?

In principle, if you don't allow multiple instances of the plugin, you
could use a custom channel like xfce4-clipman
(xfce4-panel/plugins/clipman) does,
but if maintain multiple instances is a priority, I understand as you do
that there is nothing to do it easy.. :S

Distribution maintainers can set the entire panel by default, including
plugin settings, since they know exactly which channel corresponds to each
plugin (Maybe see xfce4-panel-profiles), but as you say, the configuration
of multiple instances, they cannot set default options for new instances of
a plugin.

The only thing I can think is maintain two channels, one for each instance
of the plugin (xfce4-panel/plugins/plugin-#/*), and another as
fallback (xfce4-panel/plugins/default/whisker/*).
I think there are plugins that do fallbacks to rc files as you suggested.

Hope it helps,
Regards,
Matias

El vie, 22 oct 2021 a las 9:49, Graeme Gott (<graeme at gottcode.org>)
escribió:

> > Setting defaults/fallbacks in the plugin itself in combination with
> distros
> > being able to ship defaults so far covered all of my use cases.
> >
> > Happy to hear though if there are shortcomings!
>
> But how are the distros able to ship defaults for the plugins? That's
> where I'm getting lost. The way Xfconf handles setting system values
> works great for setting defaults for Thunar, Ristretto, etc, since they
> all have their own XML file to populate.
>
> All panel plugins share the same channel. They are all stored in the
> xfce4-panel.xml file together, and are only identified by plugin ID. It
> becomes part of their property names (since their real properties are
> things like "/plugins/plugin-1/favorites" and not just "/favorites").
> But the plugin ID can be anything!
>
> For example, if the distro assumes Whisker Menu is plugin ID 1, then the
> defaults won't be loaded if the user adds a second Whisker Menu. They
> also won't be loaded if the user removes Whisker Menu, adds something
> else, and then changes their mind and adds Whisker Menu back. It won't
> have ID 1 anymore. The plugin will be looking at some other
> "/plugins/plugin-$ID/favorites" property instead.
>
> Is there some mechanism in the Xfconf defaults I'm missing? Some way the
> panel handles translating the defaults to some other property path to
> share among instances of the same plugin type?
>
> Cheers,
> Graeme
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