Re: Installing themes from art.gnome.org via gnome-theme-manager

[Andrew Johnson <andrew ajgenius us>]

On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 15:12, Alex Combas wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 10:59, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > In the efforts to make GNOME theming easier, especially in regards to
> > those from art.gnome.org so as to make a.g.o the definitive source of
> > GNOME themes, 
> 
> No offence but it doesnt exactly seem definitive, is it suppost to be?
> If so, then why dont I see any of the themes from gnome-themes-extra?
> 

well first off "so as to make" i.e. it isn't fully yet but we want it to
be, and this is one more thing toward that end. Moreover it is the
closest thing we have to a definitive GNOME theme site. check out any
other good theme site, and we still have far more themes in every
important category. Sure there are other crappy sites with more of
everything, but they are not the sorts of things most people want to
use. More people will want a simple intuitive interface with a majority
of themes, which is what a.g.o strives for.

second. the gnome-themes-extras are in the queue and have been since the
official release of 0.1, but since the layout of the site isn't yet
conducive to them yet(i.e. metathemes), and since Gorilla requires
industrial which isn't up yet, they are being put off.

> > we have decided it would be to our advantage to
> > incorporate better installation of themes so as to be able to
> integrate
> > easy install of themes directly from a.g.o. Currently, installing
> themes
> > from art.gnome.org is a two step (or more) process that requires first
> > downloading the theme, then installing it, then switching to that
> theme
> > and as a result of bugs in system tar, or in the theme manager itself,
> > even this is not a hiccup free process. To overcome this, at least in
> > part , a lot of modern programs (such as winamp, mozilla and others)
> > allow the user to download, install and even switch to themes from a
> > website in a single step process by a common extension which the
> program
> > is associated with. I propose we make it easier for people to install
> > themes by doing this to GNOME themes, by changing the usual .tar.gz
> > extension to a special extension and having the theme manager
> associated
> > with these files so that it can "open" and install them. I believe
> this
> > would be the simplest solution. 
> 
> iirc some distrobutions like to put directorys in strange places, would
> you simply go with the LSB? And what about uninstalling the theme? What
> about theme-engines? 
> 

well for the most part I would imagine this would apply per users
primarily, i.e. ~/.themes and ~/.icons, so I fail to see how distro
would affect this. And it is rather stupid to require the user to enter
root password to install a theme anyway, which is what would probably be
required to put them wherever GNOME got installed etc.

> I noticed (perhaps wrongly) that a.g.o leaves the theme-engine up to the
> user to install, while I dont really see any way around that I think its
> still a weakness because what if the users system doenst have that
> particular engine installed or what if they dont even realize that they
> need a particular engine for the theme to work.
> 

agreed, this is a downside, however, and there has been much thought to
at least simplifying the layout so that themes and engines are
seperated, which makes more sense anyway, and is set up along the lines
of a library dependency, which is what they are. Besides which, how
would you expect to have a.g.o keep up with binary builds for every os
distro etc. This is not something a theme site can be reasonably
expected to handle.

> I also think (perhaps wrongly) that we should stop distrobuting themes
> for the desktop in seperate chunks as a.g.o does, by that I mean we
> should only distrobute gnome meta-themes. Its really frustrating for a
> user to look at a pretty screen shot and then download a theme only to
> find that about 1/5th of the desktop is affected (ie NO icons, NO gtk-1
> theme, NO wm-theme, NO xmms theme, etc etc.) 
> 
> If we start distrobuting metathemes like gnome-themes-extra has done so
> wonderfully then at least users get what they think they are getting. 
> 
> They are still be able to mix and match different parts of the
> metathemes so they will still have all the customizations they want, and
> we end up with a much more professional looking product.
> 
> Personally I like to use the Gorilla metatheme for my window borders and
> controls, but Industrial for my icons and xmms. 
> 

This is also something I have been trying to see happen, thus where I
mentioned "Details->" etc, I envision an a.g.o which matches the theme
installer, the themes section is available, but there is also a Details
section for just parts etc. especially since not all themes supply all
parts, so it is pointless to require that we only have metathemes,
because we would only have a handful of themes on the site.

> > 
> > ps. Please throw insults at ajgenius as to the lengthy-ness of some
> sentances in this proposal, as they where his idea.
> 
> Well looks like I would be a hypocrit if I threw the first stone ;0
> 
> ~Alex

;)

andrew