generic NPAPI plugin location (and gnash and firefox3)

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

(My friend came to my house and later asked my if I had shockwave/flash. 
He had spent some time following the links in firefox and then adobe's 
website but couldn't get it installed.)

Well I have firefox3 installed on NetBSD/amd64 HEAD. I had gnash installed 
too.

So I did:

sudo ln -s /usr/pkg/lib/firefox/plugins/libgnashplugin.so \
        /usr/pkg/lib/firefox3/plugins/.

(Note the "3" above.)

Killed firefox. Restarted firefox (clicked the button to reopen the saved 
sessions).

And it worked. The gnash worked for whatever site my friend was using.

So pkgsrc/multimedia/gnash has:

CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --with-npapi-plugindir=${PREFIX}/lib/firefox/plugins

(I don't know why it is repeated in options.mk.)

We should have a generic plugins directory for Netscape Plugin Application 
Programming Interface plugins.

Then some +INSTALL script fragment that symlinks in place to all supported 
plugins directories for any plugins -- AND ALSO for any application that 
supports plugins.

For example, if you install gnash first, it will copy to:

${PREFIX}/lib/NPAPI/plugins/libgnashplugin.so

(Or ns-flash, firefox-bin-flash, seamonkey-bin-flash, etc.)

And then automatically also create symlinks for all supported applications 
(if exists):
firefox
firefox3
navigator
whatever
communicator
epiphany
seamonkey
konqueror
opera

If you install something (like konqueror) later, it will create symlinks 
for everything in the ${PREFIX}/lib/NPAPI/plugins/ to new plugins 
directory.

I have heard that there are incompatibilities, but haven't seen myself. In 
addition to my example above, in the past I have used same plugins (even 
binary-only plugins) for various netscape, firefox and konqueror etc. If 
there are incompatibilities, a package could list what is support (and/or 
not supported).

Some NPAPI details are at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

Any comments on idea?