Re: GNOME Theme Package Proposal

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Sun, 2004-10-31 at 23:49 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote: 
> On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 22:18 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > A New File Format
> 
> What new file format? This is mainly a directory layout proposal, and is
> basically the same as the one I sent a couple years ago to
> freedesktop.org that just got ignored. (yay!)
> 
> > `````````````````
> > The directory structure should look something like this:
> > 
> > .
> > |-- background/
> > `-- splash/
> 
> There's no reason for these to be in sub-directories. The splash screen
> really should be part of the icon theme anyway, I think.  At least, that
> is if we don't just get rid of it entirely, since the main thing it does
> is draw the icons on top of it, they should really match always.

I can understand your reason behind this suggestion, but then surely you
should also include a background in your icon theme since icons are
drawn on the desktop, and perhaps even a GTK theme since icons are drawn
on top of the GTK theme. The fact that the icon theme is used to draw
icons on a splash screen is implementation specific, so I don't think
splash screens will ever be accepted into the icon theme specification.

The reason for having sub-directories for these two items is firstly
because it helps separation, and also that if the author wanted to
include variants then they wouldn't have to be scattered around the root
of the theme.

> 
> > |-- icon/
> 
> This should be "icons" I hope.

I used singular because it is the location of an (one) icon theme,
rather than the location of the icons itself.

> 
> > 
> > This should then be wrapped up in a gzipped tarball and given the 
> > extension
> > .gtp (Gnome-Theme-Package).
> 
> Whatever. I still think that we should just rely on the system packaging
> systems to do this properly. Implementing dependencies for theme engines
> and all that is not something that make a lot of sense for us to do,
> since we already have things that handle dependencies.

I don't think theme engines should be included in theme packages, and as
you say, they should be handled by distributions. Theme engines are
software, and themes are images and text files. This is one of the
reasons I created a separate section for theme engines on art.gnome.org.

> 
> > Extensions to gnome-theme-manager
> > `````````````````````````````````
> > gnome-theme-manager currently handles GTK, Metacity and Icon themes, 
> > but could
> > be extended to handle splash screens and backgrounds (possible 
> > integration with
> > current background chooser?).
> 
> I don't know what you mean here, but the implication scares me.

All I mean is to finish the code that handles the application of
backgrounds from a theme, and perhaps add splash screens to that list.

gnome-theme-manager already has a label to say whether a theme suggests
a background, but no way to apply it. Perhaps this doesn't actually need
any integration with the background chooser since all
gnome-theme-manager would do would be to apply a background.

-Thomas