Re: why so few themes are shipped with gnome-1.4?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com> writes:

> Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru> writes:
> 
> >  Hi, 
> > 
> >  I wonder why almost no gtk themes are shipped with gnome-1.4? The package
> > gtk-engines provides only about 5 engines (libraries that are used by themes),
> > and a one sample theme for each of them. 
> >  I think the themes is the one of the biggest advantages of gtk, why be shy
> > and only provide only few themes, 3 of which look boring like win95? I just
> > don't understand this, guys. By sparing one extra MB of packaged themes the
> > user will have two dozen themes to choose from.. I also suggest to add a
> > couple of unusable, but stunning themes just for completness and for pride of
> > gnome users.
> > 
> >  What do you think?
> > 
> 
> I think it would be cool if for GNOME 1.4.1 we included some of the
> nicer themes out htere (Crux, ThinIce, etc) in the fifth toe release.

Creating a gtk-engines-extra for fifth toe doesn't sound like a horrible
idea to me (though I don't have time to do it), and long term, I
wouldn't mind seeing gtk-engines expanded a bit.

The problems here though are:

 - Many themes (though perhaps not crux or thinice) do bad hacks
   that will cause crashes and bad interactions with other themes.
   These are not suitable for inclusion in gtk-engines or 
   GNOME at all (even though gtk-engines includes one with the
   metal theme...)

 - Selection is a problem; like GIMP plugins and panel applets,
   there are an almost infinite number, shading from very 
   nice to absolutely useless.

 - Maintainence is a problem; like GIMP plugins and panel applets,
   authors tend to disappear and code tends to rot.

Perhaps before every GNOME release, we need to have people
vote for 10 favorite themes, and we can combine those with a 
some "editors choices" into a package for the release or something...

Regards,
                                        Owen