Hi, About the status of lxpanel: 1. lxpanel-plugins is a move initiated by Fred to separate some less frequently used applets and their translations outside of the main program. Besides, this can make the development of plugins easier. However, this was not finished and was not well-tested previously at the time of lxpanel 0.4 release. So that's why the old plugin code in lxpanel trunk was still there. Besides, this will require careful modifications of Makefiles and configure.ac, which were quite dirty currently.
2. Previously Fred move the kbled plugin to lxpanel-plugins, but I think this is unnecessary since the applet is very small and it doesn't worth the work to mainain a seperate package for it. So I'll move it back to lxpanel later, and link against it statically. Personally I don't agree moving every appet to lxpanel-plugins unless the size and complexity of the plugins are big enough to compensate the additional work needed to maintain additional packages. This issue should be discussed. 3. IMO, dynamic plugins will increase startup time, and hence the mostly used applets should be statically linked and built into lxpanel. Those plugins shouldn't be moved to lxpanel-plugins. 4.I totally agreed that ABI versioning for plugins is required. The base of lxpanel, fbpanel, doesn't have it. Besides, previosuly the plugin parts are not API and ABI stable yet and things are subjected to changes. So this part is not handled yet. Later this should be settled and well-documented. Also we'll need to add some paddings to the structures for future expansion. 5. Now I'm working very heavily on PCManFM2 (the new libfm). So, I don't have time for lxpanel yet. Maybe some other developers can handle this issue? I CC this to lxde-list for further discussion. On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Marty Jack<[email protected]> wrote: > I continue to work on the panel doing cleanup and preparing for a better > layout of vertical panels. I got sidetracked looking at libwnck after > song6song posted his prototype pager. It is a pity that the window manager > interaction and data structures part of libwnck isn't separated from the > drawing part. I haven't completed looking at it, but I think we would have > an issue trying to get backgrounds working correctly. > > There is a directory lxpanel-plugins that has code in it. It appears to be > mostly duplicates of lxpanel/src/plugins, with the exception of the Menu II > that the newly added developer added. > > Can you explain the rationale for this? It seems to be causing wasted effort > because the translators are translating things in there, and it is duplicated > code that isn't being maintained. > > We have a problem with versioning of the PluginClass structure. There isn't > any. We therefore have an issue where we can't check if external plugins are > compiled against a compatible version of the PluginClass structure and we > have very little way to extend the PluginClass structure and have it work. > This is something that needs to be fixed so we don't risk the panel > segfaulting when we load external plugins and we have a path for future > extensions. I will post a proposal on the mailing list. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Lxde-list mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxde-list
