RFC: Gnome-themes

[u07ih abdn ac uk]

Hi all.
I've been thinking about the GNOME themes for ages now (at least since last
night ;)and this is what I've come up with. Watch out, it's long.

Basic layout:
A tarball which uncompresses into a themename.d directory, and contains an XML
file giving all the theme information. Then subdirectories for cursors,
gtk-theme, sounds, backgrounds and window manager themes.

***This is not an attempt to start a flamewar***
The major sticky point comes with window manager themes. A decision needs to be
made, and I don't want to be the person who makes it. We obviously can't provide
themes for every different window manager, as the size of the tarball could
become huge - the average E theme seems to be around the 500K mark, so someone
who uses say Windowmaker might get a bit annoyed at having to download a theme
for E, and a theme for Sawmill, and so on. Another problem with trying to
provide themes for every manager is that the theme creators are going to create
the theme for their window manager, so some themes will only have an Etheme,
some will only have a Windowmaker, and I think it would end up being a mess.

The other solutions are
1: Standardise on one GNOME window manager. Get it so that it is fully GNOME
compliant and perfect, and include the themes for that.
2: Write our own "Window manager" theme and then either have the GNOME WM spec
specify that a GNOME compliant WM has to be able to use our theme, or have some
way of converting from our theme to different window managers.
3: Keep it the way we are at the moment (ie, non-WM-specific) and not include
anything.

I'd give what I see as the advantages/disadvantages of each option but that
really would be flamefest material

My personal choice would be choice 1.

I think what we should do is put a news item on GNotices with the arguments for
and against the above options (and any others I've not thought of) and run a
poll to see what people want.

Implementation:
Again a couple of ways to do this.
Either we can have a theme-capplet with different pages for each of the different
theme sections, or we can have a new branch in the ctree for Themes.
I think the second is the best way, because it seems to fit in with the way the
control centre does it already.
There would be a general theme capplet, that would handle setting and saving
themes, and would also specify what parts of the theme were overridden by the
users settings (eg, maybe the user wants to use a theme, but doesn't want the
background to be changed)
For the background and sound we can use the existing capplets (although sound
doesn't work in the CVS libs, so it'll use the new sound capplet when thats
available)
The Gtk-theme capplet could be used as well, although maybe a theme colour
selector could be added, the same way as the user font button was added.
The cursors need a capplet, but as the cursor code isn't finished yet, this
isn't a major concern for the moment.

I think thats everything, I've probably forgotten something, but please send
your comments.

iain