Re: cleaning up themes

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 09:54:24 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
>
> > It is already possibly to install themes straight from art.gnome.org by
> > dragging and dropping the links into gnome-theme-manager.
>
>
> Only if they don't include new engines (which all popular themes do,
> there's only so much excitement you can generate with new colour schemes).

The top 5 rated GTK+ themes on art.gnome.org actually use engines that 
should already be available in most distributions, since they are 
included in gtk-engines, or use the pixmap engine which is now available 
in GTK+. Also, with an engine like Smooth, you can create a variety of 
different themes that are not different colour schemes. The smooth 
engine offers a range of options to create several different styles.

Metacity and Icon themes can be installed via drag and drop without any 
problems.

> If they do include engines then you're distributing arbitrary binaries in
> single-click form: that sort of thing is autopackages territory. I don't
> think it's a 5-minute thing you can whack into the control centre.

Packaging engines has been one of the sticking points for distributing 
GTK+ themes. However, a simple check for the existence of a library 
could notify the user if a theme being installed will not work because a 
theme engine is not present. While not ideal, we certainly don't want to 
start trying to distribute binaries. However, a proper packaging system 
needs to be designed in order to accommodate this.

-Thomas