Re: GNOME Art @ GUADEC

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Luca Ferretti wrote:
> Il giorno lun, 19/06/2006 alle 23.22 +0100, Thomas Wood ha scritto:
>   
> > There are several things we could discuss at GUADEC this year, and since 
> > many of the artists and maintainers of art modules will be there, it has 
> > been suggested we hold an informal meeting. There is a gnome.org revamp 
> > discussion at 10am on Thursday, 29th, which I assume a lot of you will 
> > already be interested in, so I suggest that just afterwards (11am), 
> > would be a good time to get together. Here are a few points I think we 
> > could discuss:
> >
> > * Tango: It's role in GNOME and other distributions
> >
> > * The future of gnome-themes
> >     - What themes to include
> >     - What license to use
> >
> > * Improvements and changes to the default theme
> >     - Where are we heading?
> >
> > * Revamp of GNOME theme manager
> >
> > * Meta-Theme packaging
> >
> > * plus anything else people want to discuss!
> >     
>
> Any report about those stuff?
>   
We decided there was a need to reduce the number of unmaintained themes 
in gnome-themes. It was agreed that the best themes to keep would be 
Clearlooks, Crux and Mist, and that we should add a new 
Industrial/Gorilla theme. I have already done the work to remove the 
other themes, and have left Glider in as well, until a suitable 
Industrial-based theme is created. These themes where chosen because 
they were all relatively unique and did not look too similar, as this 
has been one of the criticisms of gnome-themes in the past. The old 
themes would be re-packaged in a one-off tarball to allow people to 
install them if they wished.

The licensing issue was also discussed, but unfortunately no one really 
knows what the situation is. For the moment, things will stay as they 
are, but if we want to add the Gorilla icon theme, we will have to 
investigate further as Jakub wants this to be cc-by-sa. Sending an 
e-mail to the FSF might be an idea here, to get some clarity on the 
licensing relationship between icon themes and applications.

Tango is obviously going to play a big role in the future of the Gnome 
appearance, since it is being used as the new style in the Gnome icon 
theme. The Crux make over is also using Tango guidelines. We need to 
revamp or just cleanup the Mist icon theme (flat-blue), but I don't know 
whether this should use the Tango guidelines.

We also discussed moving the accessibility themes out of the theme 
manager somehow, and perhaps placing them into an accessibility control 
center applet. This would have to be approved by the usability list and 
the control center team.
Finishing the SVG versions of the High Contrast icons was agreed to be a 
priority, as well as trying to get applications to install their 
accessibility icons into the HighContrast theme.

We didn't get time to discuss much about the future of the default 
theme, but any comments on possible improvements or direction, or any 
other comments on the points above, are very welcome!

-Thomas