Re: (No default theme change please) Re: default theme consensus

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

On 13/08/04 11:00, Murray Cumming wrote:

> > Is it something that can be fixed or worked around in the
> > language binding?
> >    
> Here's the bug:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142417
>
> I get the idea that it's fixable in GTK+.
>  
Okay.  From what Owen says there it would require an additional syntax 
in the gtkrc file, rather than modifying the interpretation of any 
existing syntax.  Since Gnome 2.8 is using GTK 2.4 this is not going to 
happen for this release (it might be worth looking to add the syntax for 
GTK 2.6 though).

[snip]

> I think it affects at least every single gtkmm or Gtk# application that
> has menus. I think gossip has the same problem, because it subclasses in
> C.
>  
I'll take your word for it about Gossip's problems.

> > As I understand it, the problem is that the theme applies styles to
> > widgets with particular class names.  If an app uses subclasses of those
> > widgets, then those styles won't be applied.  This appears to be a
> > problem that is present in many distributors default themes (eg.
> > Industrial, Bluecurve, etc), so many people are already using a theme
> > with this problem.  So using Indubstrial as the default theme won't be
> > any worse than what these people are already using.
> >    
>
> I don't _think_ Bluecurve has the problem (I'm not sure why), so we didn't
> hear about it so much.
>  
In the Bluecurve gtkrc on my system, it contains the following:

   widget_class "*.GtkMenuItem.*" style "bluecurve-menu-item"
   widget_class "*.GtkAccelMenuItem.*" style "bluecurve-menu-item"
   ...

This is the type of syntax that the previous bug report was on about.  
Does Indubstrial break in some other way?

> Most major GNOME apps don't use the bindings, so they are unlikely to get
> a lot of reports.
>  
Does Gnome 2.8 change the situation w.r.t. apps using bindings?  If not, 
then I don't see why we should block changing the theme.  Particularly 
if we can modify it so that it applies the styles to widgets that use 
gtkmm's and GTK#'s names (which is a work around, but solve the problem 
from the user's perspective).

> > I do think that this bug should be fixed, but I don't agree that it
> > needs to be fixed at the GTK level for Gnome 2.8.  While we don't have a
> > correct fix yet, one option would be to alter Indubstrial to also apply
> > the same styles to the widget class names that gtkmm and Gossip use
> > (does this sound doable with gtkmm?).  In a future version of Gnome
> > where the gtkrc file format is extended to handle this problem, the
> > hacks could then be removed.
> >    
Do you have any comments on this work around?  It should be pretty easy 
for you to make the change to Indubstrial and test against some gtkmm 
apps.  Just look for lines in the gtkrc file like this:
   widget_class "...GtkFoo..." style "foo-style"
and add an extra line like:
   widget_class "...gtkmm__GtkFoo..." style "foo-style"

(I assume a similar fix is possible for GTK#).

If that change works and the fix is merged into Indubstrial, would you 
have any other objections to the theme?  If not, then people can get 
back to arguing about the two themes without worrying about technical 
details :)

James.

--
Email: james jamesh id au
WWW:   http://www.jamesh.id.au/