Re: Industrial in 2.10?

[Andrew Johnson <ajgenius ajgenius us>]

On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 11:34:10 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: 
> Well Thomas (thos) and Andrew (ajgenius) seems be taking on
> maintainership of gtk-engines so I guess it is re-maintained. Question
> of course is if we want a separate engines package or if all engines
> should go into gnome-themes. Since my package gnome-themes-extras use
> booth Smooth and Industrial I would need to depend on whichever package 
> includes it, but it doesn't really matter to me which one (as I don't
> see a scenario where someone want to have just g-t-e installed and not
> g-t).
> 
> I guess one advantage of the split between themes and engines is that
> thos and ajgenius can hack freely on the engines then without risking to
> hamper theme developers releasing new versions due to temporary engine
> instabilities in CVS.

one advantage perhaps, but not the primary concern.

> On the other hand I feel we are getting a little overboard in GNOME with
> making everything a separate package which do create extra
> work/complexity for both packagers and for crazy nuts who build from
> source themselves; so this speaks for the everything into g-t approach.

While I definitely agree it does seem we have a few too many modules
that could be integrated, in this case the separation is in my opinion a
good thing for several reasons given what we have.

Of course you could argue that gtk-engines and gnome-themes as they
exist really shouldn't at all, because it forces users to install many
themes and engines they may or may not want, instead of just selecting a
few sane defaults - and isn't that the gnome mantra? -  and letting them
install any others they want themselves, and moreover simply add to the
complexity of the gnome compile chain.

But either way this is an argument for another time as at least for now
we have what we have and should make the best of an already overly
complicated situation.

Obviously given what we have the most notable problem is the problem of
dependencies. gtk theme engines are an especially pernicious issue
because they are not used by just gnome users, but xfce, or openbox, or
even those who don't use a gtk+ desktop at all but use some gtk+ apps, a
fact its too easy to forget when wrangling over gnome-themes etc.

Consider the fact that currently many gtk engines are spread out in
multiple locations, in cvs, in tarballs, on art/theme sites, often each
a different version of the same as no one has time to maintain, now add
that they are required for various gnome-themes and thus included there
as well, now we have a dependency headache for any linux distro, or unix
which would desire to allow users to include gtk but not gnome, or just
parts of gnome, or other combinations thereof, because its no longer
just up to the distro to ensure required engines are included, and users
choose/grab the rest.

By breaking out most common engines in gnome/gtk world into gtk-engines,
then any distro which includes gtk+ can include one single package for
them, without depending on a bunch of "gnome" packages, at most a
minimal few which would likely be included anyway(eg librsvg), meaning
less headaches for package management, less headaches for artwork sites,
and less headaches for users as the users will find most themes they
grab from art sites Just Work, and never need bother themselves with
downloading/compiling engines because they use XFCE/KDE, and don't have
gnome-themes installed, or there distro doesn't include that particular
engine.

As for engine vs theme separation Technically engines are code,
libraries, think of them as akin to image loaders. You can't load png
images without libpng, and you cannot load industrial themes with
libindustrial. This doesn't mean you should have all png images in with
libpng nor should libpng be compiled in the same package as png images,
any more then you should put all industrial themes in with industrial or
the reverse. Of course with theme engines we have many which provide a
single default look, and so arguably should include the default gtkrc,
just like often times image libraries will include default example
images. 

So the default themes for those engines which have them should go in
gtk-engines, and non-default/gnome-specific themes can go in
gnome-themes, or gnome-themes-extras, or on art sites. At least for now.
There are several arguments there I am sure for either way.. for another
day.

Andrew