[Proposal] Meta-themes

[Stephan Arts]

As you all might now, handling themes for Gtk+, xfwm4 or even
icon-themes is not really trivial for new users. And installing them
from a GUI is not really possible with Xfce at this moment.

Another issue, when an artist designs a general look-n-feel for the
desktop, he is required to package each component separately. When
browsing around the *-look.org websites, you see that several themes
are first created for one windowmanager, and later ported to another.
Like metacity, xfwm, and (sometimes) kwin. The same is true for Qt and
Gtk+ themes.

To allow artists to create 'complete' themes, and to simplify the
installation interface for those themes, I would like to propose
meta-themes. Theme packages which contain all the themes and a file
with information about where to install them, the license of each
component, it's author and the release-date.

This might be something worth to consider when implementing some sort
of theme-install mechanism for 4.6.

However, for something like this to be useful, it might be a good idea
to get it accepted by KDE and Gnome developers too. So it might be an
idea to pass it through to freedesktop.org.

But as a first step, I would like to know what you think of the idea.
I have made a first draft[1], as a first example of how it could be
done and I would like you to take a look.


-- Stephan


[1] http://mocha.foo-projects.org/~stephan/meta-themes-spec.html