[Proposal] Meta-themes

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 11:21:08 +0200 Stephan Arts wrote:

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

A few comments:

* Have you looked at how GNOME and KDE does this?  If you design a
totally new system, I would think it unlikely that Freedesktop would
adopt it (or rather, that GNOME and KDE would adopt it).  A new spec
should incorporate the better elements of what GNOME and KDE are using,
and, ideally, should be somehow backward-compatible with their
metatheme systems.

* Directory locations should be defined in terms of xdg base
directories.

* Agree with Alexander: just make the extension .metatheme.

* Semi-agree with Jean-Philippe: the metatheme should have a field for
desktop wallpaper, but it needs to be optional somehow: I don't want
the metatheme installer/selector touching my wallpaper if I switch
themes.  I guess this optional-ness doesn't have to be in the spec;
maybe just a note that implementations can do what they please.

* For the cursors section, the search directories are defined by xorg,
so that's not difficult to find.

* Wallpapers: Obviously we need to define a location for them to be
installed.  Probably $XDG_DATA_DIRS/wallpapers is fine, unless people
have a name other than 'wallpaper' that they like better.

On a side note, I'm also wondering if we (well, gtk, etc.) should be
moving to use the xdg basedirs for themes and whatnot.  Currently, for
user-installed themes, they get put in ~/.themes/.  They should go in
$XDG_DATA_HOME/themes (usually ~/.local/share/themes/).  Perhaps this
is a separate issue that should be filed on gtk's bugzilla... maybe
I'll do that.  We could at least do this for keythemes and xfwm4
themes, and leave ~/.themes/ support in there for backward compat.

But I can't stress this more: *please* look at what GNOME and KDE are
doing, and please involve fd.o ASAP if you want to go through with
this.  That's the only way you'll possibly get support and adoption
from the other desktop environments.  They're not going to change the
way they do things because little Xfce wants them to.  If you don't
particularly care if G/K adopt this spec, that's fine, but I think it's
a bit of a waste of time then, when we could just be reusing GNOME's
metatheme format.

	-brian