Changing the theme format

[Thomas Thurman <tthurman gnome org>]

I am assuming that there'll be a few changes necessary to the Metacity theme format for our purposes.  The current theme format (v2) is showing its age and there have been quite a few changes suggested even for original Metacity.  These range from smaller matters such as the ability for themes to refer to other themes (so for example a theme might only change named colours from an existing theme), up to wider blue-sky ideas like switching to an SVG-based format [1] or putting the theme parsing code into a separate library, and possibly relicensing it, so that it could be used by other WMs.)

But I'm wondering how much of an upheaval we want to cause in the theme format.  There may be advantages in keeping as much of the theme format as possible, because the code is reliable and well-tested.  Have any decisions been made about how much of the existing theme format and theming code should be kept?

Lastly, it's always been a failing of the theme format that there's no decent editor.  Even if Mutter never moves to v3 of the format and stays with v2, I'm hoping to put together something that will be useful to theme artists.  (Clearly this will involve talking to theme artists.)

Thomas

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2009/03/18/squib-of-the-day-svg-theme-support/