Re: Maybe a silly question, but ...

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom idecnet com>]

rjcole tempus int gu edu au (2000-09-08 at 1744.12 +1000):
> I run gnome on my desktop and on my laptop but with different
> themes. Today I ran "the gimp" on my laptop but was connected from my
> desktop. So my X-server was running on my desktop machine. All pretty
> straight forward except that the gimp used the theme from my laptop
> rather than the theme from my X-display (running on the desktop machine).

Apps load config from the machine that runs them, not where they are
shown. X "shown" does not care about location (except security, speed
and other network related things). For example, you can run app Crash
as user Test in machine Dummy, and show it in machine Foo where you
are running as user Bar, and it will use Test config, not Bar one.

> Shouldn't the gnome theme stuff in client apps like "the gimp" --- and
> here I confess my total ignorance of the code and the design --- find
> out what theme is running on the display rather than what theme is
> selected in the home directory of the user.

I dunno if that is possible. Probably not... I asked if there was a
default way to know what user is running something and I got a "no"
(it is possible to tell if the apps wants and the systems talk, but
nothing in the specs, only custom extension, and with lots of
problems).

> And while I've got your attention are the gnome themes totally based on
> pixmaps or do they contain some executable component. If they had some
> executable component like in Qt then Gnome stuff attached to the
> display couldn't send a copy of the theme to the client. It could
> simply name the theme and rely on it being installed on the client
> system.

Some themes are pixmap based, others are full binary and others
mix. Of course, the binary are faster. BTW, some themes use a pixmap
background, but are not pixmap based (they just request a pixmap as
background instead of single color) and look good but are not so slow
as full pixmap or mix (bubbles or cheese GTK+ themes are of this
"pixmap bg" kind, IIRC). So themes are complex things.

You can not send "copies" (be it the exec part or the pixmaps) cos the
display and the running machine can be of different kind, or in the
best case same architecture but using different lib versions. You can
not make sure that they have the same themes installed either. The
only requisite for X is that all machines speak the same protocol. And
as explained above, the running machine is the one whose config is
used for the app.

Except if someone has a magic solution I do not know, I think you are
out of luck. :[ But see the positive part, you always know if the app
is local or remote. ;]

GSR