Re: Themes Themes... Drool time?

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow mit edu>]

I disagree that the default gtk theme drawing code should be linked
directly into the gtk library. Perhaps this could be an installation
option, but it should not be mandatory. There's no reason users of the
pixmap theme, the win95 theme, the mac theme or whatever should have
to pay for having the native gtk code in memory, any more than the
other way around. To support a reasonably defaulting behavior, though,
it would have to be possible to mix and match drawing functions from
multiple drawing plugins.

Also, to avoid future confusion, I propose the following terminology:

* "drawing plugin" - one of the dynamically loadable libraries that
implements a look or set of looks.

* "theme" - a set if styles for widgets, including assignments of what
drawing plugins to use for which widget, and settings of appropriate
style options.

So for example, there would be the native gtk drawing plugin, the
pixmap drawing plugin, and perhaps others. But for each of these (and
even for various combinations) there could be a whole slew of themes -
the native gtk code already has tiled pixmap support as it is, so you
could have, say, a "night sky" theme using the default drawing
functions and a set of black pixmaps with stars on them that tile
nicely. And the pixmap drawing plugin we're all waiting for raster to
code up will allow much more complicated things along the lines of E
themes.

This stuff probably shouldn't be crossposted to the gnome-gui-list any more,
though.

 - Maciej Stachowiak