Re: cleaning up themes

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 23:54 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 21:52 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > 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+. 
> 
> ClearLooks is still pretty new - I don't think it's available in Fedora
> Core <4, right? Lots of users haven't upgraded yet.
> 
> Anyway, I'm sure your right and most engines are now in gtk-engines, you
> guys do a great job of maintaining that and keeping it responsive.
> Still, especially once Cairo/GTK+ 2.8 is out and drawing isn't only for
> people who enjoy pain anymore I'd expect to see lots more theme engines

Cairo doesn't really make writing a theme engine easier. It mostly just
makes alpha curves easier, and adds alpha blending to straight lines as
well. If it were really to make themeing easier, I would expect to see
less engines, and more themes that do not require engines. But I do not
know if any changes have been maded to the default style to make buttons
round, or less 3d, with the default look.

> > 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. 
> 
> That's incredibly lame, it'd be better not to give one-click installs at
> all if it'll randomly fail on the hottest new themes.

It won't randomly fail, it would warn the user I hope.

> > While not ideal, we certainly don't want to start trying to distribute 
> > binaries. 
> 
> Why not? ;)

Because there is no standardized packaging format and distribution
method, and beyond that, the distributions that do use the same package
formats, often have different policies for where things actually go on
the filesystem? And no, autopackage is not a solution for it. Most
people do not have it. Adding yet more places for a user to have to
look to see what versions of software they have, what upgrades are
available (which will cause a LOT of problems, as software will be in
one database, but not the system packaging db), and other such
utilities, will just add confusion to the process.

-- dobey