Re: Theme suggestion: use shared libraries

[<nuke bayside net>]

On Fri, 6 Feb 1998, Marc Ewing wrote:

> "Geoff Harrison \(mandrake\)" <mandrake@mandrake.net> writes:
> > > Enlightenment enters the picture =] I think that this is a great iudea
> > > because it would address most of my conerns with enlightenment. I've done
> > > a number of themes for E and the bigest deficiency I have found is the
> > > complete reliznce of pixmaps. I would like to be able to insert a
> > > different rendering module, and then have a specific
> > > button/subwindow/widget use it to render a vector graphic. Or some other
> > > method of drawing vectors rather than relying of scaled pixmaps. Hrm.
> > 
> > Well, I can say that in the future there are planned a number of non-reliance
> > on pixmap things, however there is a fairly unlimited boundary to the usage
> > of pixmaps (with scaling).   More than "relying" on scaled pixmaps -- allowin
> > g
> > the use of pixmaps for widgets (and masks) frees up the user to a wider selec
> > tion
> > of design options.   However, I am fairly certain that allowing the use of ex
> > ternal
> > rendering modules is also not an unappealing option.
> 
> Luckily you can have both (after some work of course).  It may have
> already been said in all the discussions, but I'll state it concisely
> here.  We can have a GTK with "pluggable" drawing modules, one of which
> is the standard GTK drawing stuff, and another that uses exclusively
> pixmaps a-la Elightenment.  If someone just wants to draw a cool
> theme, they can ship a collection of pixmaps (and other stuff) to be
> used with the E-type drawing pluggin.  If someone wants to implement
> something in C to look like Win95 or whatever, they make an entirely
> new drawing module.
> 
> Something like:
> 
> GTK:                               [ GTK ]
>                                 /     |     \
> Drawing module:      [ E drawing ] [Win95]  [ GTK Traditional ]
>                        /   |   \
> Themes:             [A]   [B]   [B]
> 
> Is there something is that plan that doesn't work?

yes, because eventually there will be people wanting Mac, NeXT, and even
Athena. those will all have to go between [Win95] and [ Gtk Traditional ]
in your diagram. admittedly, this isn't an entirely bad idea if someone
could implement it The Right Way(tm), but i haven't seen any really good
suggestions on how that would work (except for dynamic pointers to the
widget drawing functions, which wouldn't be very fun to code).