Re: cleaning up themes

[Mike Hearn <mike plan99 net>]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 21:52 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
> The top 5 rated GTK+ themes on art.gnome.org actually use engines that 
> should already be available in most distributions, since they are 
> included in gtk-engines, or use the pixmap engine which is now available 
> in GTK+. 

ClearLooks is still pretty new - I don't think it's available in Fedora
Core <4, right? Lots of users haven't upgraded yet.

Anyway, I'm sure your right and most engines are now in gtk-engines, you
guys do a great job of maintaining that and keeping it responsive.
Still, especially once Cairo/GTK+ 2.8 is out and drawing isn't only for
people who enjoy pain anymore I'd expect to see lots more theme engines

> Metacity and Icon themes can be installed via drag and drop without any 
> problems.

Yes. That's good. Actually last time I tried that the icons went to the
wrong place but I guess these days that's fixed :)

> Packaging engines has been one of the sticking points for distributing 
> GTK+ themes. 

A more powerful/faster pixmap engine might take away much of the need
for custom engines, but some themes will always be software and not
default settings.

> However, a simple check for the existence of a library 
> could notify the user if a theme being installed will not work because a 
> theme engine is not present. 

That's incredibly lame, it'd be better not to give one-click installs at
all if it'll randomly fail on the hottest new themes.

> While not ideal, we certainly don't want to start trying to distribute 
> binaries. 

Why not? ;)

thanks -mike