Re: Modify theme api to use cairo - any chance to get that in?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 10:30 -0500, Clemens Eisserer wrote:

> > have you even read Thomas Wood's reply to your own email?
> 
> Sure I have, its sounds like the best way to solve this problem.
> However it seems to be a huge task, and the existing themes would have
> to be rewritten instead of find/replace/rebuild.
> Probably would take another 1-2 years.

if you switch from a Drawable to a cairo_t* engines will have to be
rewritten - but they will also still have the issues they have right
now. the real plan is to actually address the issues, not paper over
them by having gtk+ call gdk_cairo_create() for the theme engines.

> Is there any way to get only a slightly modified theme api into GTK2?
> What are arguments against it?

that it's pointless? a useless papering over real issues?

> In the long term Thomas's solution is clearly superior, but wouldn't
> such a large change be more appropriate for GTK-3 (where plans are to
> introduce a new theme engine/api anyway)?

you seem to be under the impression that changing the API of the theme
engines is not going to require an ABI bump - which is still problematic
to handle from a loadable module perspective, and the gtk+ maintainers
are not really looking forward to the mess it causes (especially with
poorly maintained third party themes).

gtk+ 3.x is the occasion to bump API *and* ABI, so time and effort
should be spent into looking at ways to solve issues of the 2.x API.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi