Re: gep-2, Desktop Theme Sets

[Nils Pedersen <n p sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com> writes:
>
> > gep-2, a proposal for "Desktop Theme Set" support, is now in GNOME cvs. 
> > I don't think the push to the website is working yet, so I attach the
> > current revision, or you can get it from cvs/gep/proposals/gep-2.html
>
> I force-updated it. Tried jrb's rube goldberg thing but didn't really
> succeed.
>  
>
> Anyway, I want to see us start from the top down. We are basically out
> of space in the Preferences menu. Do we add submenus and end up like
> the KDE prefs menu or the GNOME 1.x menu of old?
>
> If not we need to think this through.
>
> Just adding a Theme Set control panel will give us these
> appearance-related control panels:
>
>  - Background
>  - Font           (we should rename this Fonts btw)
>  - Theme          (includes toolkit - WM - icon)
>  - Theme Set      (includes both Background and Fonts in the set, not
>                    just themes)
>
> In this setup we're still missing one possibly important panel, namely
> Colors where you can just change colors (overriding the theme
> presumably). [1] 
>
> I believe that having both Theme and Theme Set, with Theme Set
> actually grouping Background and Fonts in addition to Theme, makes
> little sense. So I'm opposed to just adding a Theme Set control panel
> without reworking the big picture.


Yes, I'm beginning to think we are overloading the theme concept here.

From the Documentation style guide:

"A group of coordinated settings that specify how a part of your interface
appears. For example, you can select a default theme for dialog elements."

Which also seems pretty broad.


> How to rework?


Well one way might to be take a step back and try and figure out what the
requirements are :)

For example:

Gnome should support single switch configuration to support different
classes of user. These classes of user could be determined by:

1) accessibility requirements
2) previous experiences (transitioning windows users)
3) environment (home user, work user, country, language)
4) some custom config that a sysadmin wants
etc...

Now the scope of some of these "coordinated settings" are beyond what we 

have been talking about. But if we introduce say the concept of "User Theme"

as well as appearance theme (which we already have), then maybe both Bill
and Seth will be happy. I'm not suggesting that we go off and implement
something that meets all the above requirements, but the different classes of
a11y user could be the first step?

I dunno, just an idea, take it or leave it...

Nils

P.S. and i didn't use the p word once :)