Presently, users cannot compile and use their own panel plugins. This creates a bit of inflexibility where-as a user is unable to customize their own panel with new plugins that they download or develop. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Ideally, a default plugins location would be added to the basedir spec. I'm surprised it's not there already.
Won't fix for 4.2, but it is there for the development version in SVN.