[Feature Request] Add a warning about incompatible plugins instead of simply ignoring them to the "add panel items" menu and/or panel itself?

I am a user of the xfce4-fsguard plugin.

Yesterday I have updated xfce4 to the 4.16 version. As a result, all my "fsguard" widgets disappeared from the panel. I could not even find "fsguard" in the "add panel items" menu. Why?

I ldd'd all the binaries in the /bin/ and /usr/bin/, but found no broken. (Not an obvious thing for a typical user to do, and even it hasn't brought me success.)

I had to rebuild the package from source to have fsguard back. I am not a Linux newbie, I am kinda used to debugging such cryptic situations, but still would XFCE like to be a little nicer in this respect?

Would it be possible to display "broken widgets" icons on the panel and/or "disabled lines" in the "Add Panel Items" menu, in order to warn the user that theirs system setup is now inconsistent and they need to either rebuild the plugins from source or install the rebuilt versions from apt/yum/pkgsrc whatever they use?

added 2. Feature label

As a number of panel items will be broken/usable when upgrading to 4.16, it definitely would be better UX for something to indicate to the user why the items are no longer functioning or about its removal.

Possibly a notification dialog could appear mentioning the list of items that have been removed because they are no longer compatible. @ochosi: what do you think?

I'm not sure how you upgraded and why this particular plugin became unusable, but I'd prefer not showing plugins that won't work with the panel in the list. After all we would then also give the user some guidance as to how to resolve the situation, and that can be very tricky. That's also the rationale behind not showing Gtk2 plugins, because those simply won't work with the panel anymore.

So I'd prefer to get to the bottom of why fsguard failed for you and why recompiling fixed it. Did you build everything by yourself when upgrading to 4.16?

After all we would then also give the user some guidance as to how to resolve the situation, and that can be very tricky.

Well, that would be a huge added value! But for me at least a message similar to "ask your OS vendor for detail" would already be a huge help.

That's also the rationale behind not showing Gtk2 plugins, because those simply won't work with the panel anymore.

Well, how would a user know that they won't work any more if nobody is telling him? I don't think that an average user knows the difference between GTK2 and GTK3. I think a message similar to "Something is wrong with this plugin, ask your OS vendor for detail" would be good enough.

So I'd prefer to get to the bottom of why fsguard failed for you and why recompiling fixed it. Did you build everything by yourself when upgrading to 4.16?

Well, most plugins that didn't come with the system itself, failed. I think it is totally reasonable that they would, because they are years older that 4.16. Recompiling fixed it because I had to invest some manual labour, I do not remember what exactly. Perhaps, I just fetched the newest release and it turned out to be compatible with 4.16, or had to compile from git master.

1. I think if you're compiling plugins yourself you should know what you're doing.
2. Distributors should only distribute plugins that work with the panel version they are shipping.

If you feel you want to invest time and write code to catch these cases feel free to open a merge request!

closed

added 3. Won't Fix 5. User Experience (UX) labels