Re: Re-inventing Metatheme

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Here is how I think "metathemes" should work.

We have gconf keys for:

 - gtk theme
 - window manager theme
 - desktop background
 - icon theme
 - etc.

If you download a "metatheme", it contains two things:

 - themes in one or more of the above categories
 - gconf settings to set your gconf keys to point to the included
   themes

There is no gconf key for "metatheme" because a metatheme isn't a
setting, it's just a group of settings you can apply.

So if you _apply_ a "Jungle" metatheme, it might change your
background settings to the jungle image, your font to some ugly
shareware jungle-looking font, your gtk theme to something green, and
so on.

You can then go change only the background but keep all the other
aspects of the jungle metatheme for example.

We need a name for "metatheme" to appear in the user interface; 
"skin"? "theme scheme"? ;-)

In any case if you do it this way it's dead simple to implement and
doesn't require changing where themes live.  All you have to define is
a standard way to put a collection of themes into a single tarball, a
way to install a tarball like that, and a way to store the gconf
settings to be applied (can just be a shell script that calls
gconftool perhaps).

Havoc