Re: Clarius

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 10:01 +1200, Glynn Foster wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> > I'm going to coin a new term: key churn.  This is when people
> > make frivolous and unnecessary changes to GConf keys or their
> > default values.  It sucks for large deployments.  Gnome is
> > bigger than your personal desktop.
> 
> I don't really care too much about the name change, but what I do care about is
> the migration story between themes as new engines/icons/whatever are dropped in
> and out. This stuff isn't as smooth as it should be - hopefully Calum can
> provide details of what currently happens [we documented this for an ARC case
> recently].

I don't care about the name change out of some phonetophilic
adoration of the word "Clearlooks".  I care because of the
problems it introduces.

Scenario 1) I have, at some point, explicitly set my theme
to Clearlooks, rather than getting Clearlooks from the GConf
default value.  I upgrade to Gnome 2.16.  What happens?

Interim 1) I utter some choice words about the ugly boxiness
of the default GTK+ rendering.  But I'm pretty clever, so I
go to the theme manager, find Clarius, and switch.  Clarius
is now explicitly set as my theme in GConf.

Scenario 2) I go to use another machine that's mounting
the same NFS home directory, or is otherwise getting the
same GConf values.  This machine is running Gnome 2.14,
which doesn't include Clarius.

Interim 2) I utter some choice words and post a flame to
Slashdot and/or OSNews.  I go to the theme manager and
change my theme back to Clearlooks.

Scenario 3) I go back to do some work on the machine that's
running Gnome 2.16.  See scenario 1.

Friends don't let friends churn keys.

--
Shaun