Re: (No default theme change please) Re: default theme consensus

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

On 13/08/04 09:17, Murray Cumming wrote:

> Because indu[b|s]trial (I never heard of glider before) does not yet work
> properly with many applications that subclass GtkMenuItems (Applications
> built with language bindings. Also gossip, and others, I think), I request
> that we do not make this change. And if we had already made the change, I
> would be asking for us to revert it now rather than when it's too late to
> revert it to correct the regression.
>
> I am guilty of not spending time to fix this GTK+ problem myself.
>
> I have no opinion on the prettiness/suitability of the theme itself.
>  
How many language bindings does this actually effect, out of interest?  
I've never noticed these problems with the Python bindings, for 
instance.  Is it something that can be fixed or worked around in the 
language binding?  It'd be good to get a concrete figure on how many 
apps this affects, rather than vague statements that it breaks some 
applications.

As I understand it, the problem is that the theme applies styles to 
widgets with particular class names.  If an app uses subclasses of those 
widgets, then those styles won't be applied.  This appears to be a 
problem that is present in many distributors default themes (eg. 
Industrial, Bluecurve, etc), so many people are already using a theme 
with this problem.  So using Indubstrial as the default theme won't be 
any worse than what these people are already using.

[on a side note, it'd be interesting to know how many bug reports 
distributors get about this problem w.r.t. those themes].

I do think that this bug should be fixed, but I don't agree that it 
needs to be fixed at the GTK level for Gnome 2.8.  While we don't have a 
correct fix yet, one option would be to alter Indubstrial to also apply 
the same styles to the widget class names that gtkmm and Gossip use 
(does this sound doable with gtkmm?).  In a future version of Gnome 
where the gtkrc file format is extended to handle this problem, the 
hacks could then be removed.

James.

--
Email: james jamesh id au
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