Re: Theme patriation

["Iain *" <iaingnome gmail com>]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:40 AM, Rui Tiago Cação Matos
<tiagomatos gmail com> wrote:

> 2. Make GTK able to draw the window frame client side. At first sight,
> this could be done in GtkWindow.
>
> Kristian Hoegsberg has a nice analysis of this at
> http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/client-side-decorations.txt with
> Pros and Cons.

I don't see a lot in his pros section that cannot be accomplished
today as it stands without changing metacity.
We've then got some weird "force move" for it the app is stuck, which
is handwavingly passed off as being able to be
accomplished "with fewer hacks" than the current model

>> An application can already draw its own borders if it wants.

This seems to be the important thing you miss.
Now, of course we can do things to make it easier

> This could be a way forward but would it ever be as flexible as doing
> it client side? Artists are always coming up with shinier ideas :-)

Conversely, there are some things that would be a pain in the ass to
do if the decorations were done client side
Think if the window manager was using Clutter to draw the decorations.
Having the decorations fade out, or buttons fade to different colours,
or the window titles animated
that sort of stuff is not nice to do in Gtk (sadly), but trivial in
Clutter (plus it has the benefit of being passed off to the GPU)

> Agreed. Moreover, the artist shouldn't have to create one theme for
> the window frame and another for the window content.

One theme format, sure.
One theme...I'm not so sure.

Ultimately, no-one is going to be able to agree to this before seeing the code.
If you think it'll work better, go ahead and code it up, then come
back and we can see what we think.
Handwavy sentences like "it can be worked around with fewer hacks" are
not very convincing.

iain