Ideas for 4.2: themes

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hey all,

Here's another idea.

To me it doesn't really make sense to have all these theme packages in
our CVS. For one, they will not change all that much and secondly, it's
a bit all or nothing and I would prefer people to be able to pick and
choose from the available themes. Also, we should encourage other people
to create themes and make them available for general use.

All of this is IMO better served by placing them on a theme site and
advertise this on our website and in the documentation. The packages in
CVS will have a few basic themes included, while for further
customizations we refer to the theme site. This may even improve
visibility of xfce, when lots of people start posting themes.

I could be wrong though, since gnome seems to have decided they need
their gnome-themes/gnome-themes-extra packages to bundle some nice
themes.

Olivier wanted themedepot.org to become our 'official' repository and
that sounds fine to me. It seems to be a very nice theme site.

Apparently the guy who runs it needs an icon for the xfce category;
because the category icons are really small I think the favicon that
Francois created for the website would be a very good candidate.

We need to have a good look at our themes, decide which ones to include
by default and post the others separately on themedepot.org. 

If we decide to do this, it might be a good idea to warn themedepot.org
about it ;-)


Related to this we might consider putting the user themes in the same
location for all modules. Currently xfwm4 places the themes in
~/.themes/xfwm4 while the panel and (I presume) xffm put them in
~/.xfce4/ . 

~/.themes/<themename>/<program> seen to be a bit of a standard, so we
could decide to use that, but I don't feel too strongly about this.

Eventually, we may want to start using the base-directory spec from
freedesktop.org for our file locations (I haven't actually looked to see
how it will affect us).

All comments are welcome.

	Jasper