Win32 Plugin Installation Paths

I am just going to make a quick proposal which most of you won't care 
about, but I feel like asking here anyway.

I see a lot of instances of people upgrading Gaim and finding that Gaim 
has removed parts of their third-party plugin installations.  Plugins 
with installers install to c:\Program Files\Gaim (or other Gaim 
installation directory) and the installation process always uninstalls 
the old Gaim before installing the new one, leaving the potential that 
files installed by Gaim's plugins may be removed.

I see two possible solutions, and would like to gauge which one is most 
preferred and then I'll make it happen.

1) Let plugins keep installing where they do.  Modify the installation 
of Gaim to "upgrade" rather than Uninstall.  This means we have to keep 
the installer updated with a list of deprecated files, so that we know 
which files must be removed on account of being outdated before we copy 
new files.

2) Add a new installation path for third party items:

(A) Add support for plugin installations (and themes, etc) to the 
system's All Users profile path (Win9x "c:\windows\all users\Application 
Data\"; Win2k/XP "c:\documents and settings\All Users\Application Data\").

(B) Add support for plugin installations (and themes, etc) to the 
system's "Common Files" (usually "C:\program files\common 
files\[product]\") directory.  Common files is usually used for items 
shared between applications, so the former may be a better option.

The latter solution requires a bunch of Gaim changes that are #ifdef 
_WIN32'd with a function to look up this path and then it's a simple 
matter of making everything look there.  In that case, any plugins that 
do install would be preferred to install to the "All Users" or "Common 
Files" location instead of the program directory.

Please let me know what's best in the eyes of Gaim.  Also, think about 
whether I should develop this patch to HEAD and oldstatus, or just HEAD.

Kevin


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