Re: Re-inventing Metatheme

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes: 
> This sounds inadequate from a usability perspective. The typical theme
> user will only care about setting a matched set of themes, not
> monkeying with them individually. Therefore it is important to be able
> to answer questions like "what is my current theme" in the simple UI
> that only gives a list of metathemes, so you have sane feedback when
> you change it, and can go back and look later to tell your friend the
> name so he can try it too, and so on.

If I choose the Jungle metatheme and then customize the background, is
the Jungle theme still selected?

That question is just as hard to answer however you implement
things. If you can come up with an answer, then I bet it's just as
possible to implement the answer given my cheesy implementation as it
is with some more overengineered implementation. e.g. maybe the answer
is "the last metatheme you manually selected" or "the metatheme most
like your current settings" - both implementable with my cheesy
approach.

Whether you present metathemes as a kind of theme (with a list of
themes and an active theme) or as a bundle of prefs to apply
write-only, is a UI issue that's orthogonal to how you implement.

Havoc