Re: RFC: Gnome-themes

[John Kodis <kodis jagunet com>]

On Tue, Nov 30, 1999 at 01:30:36PM +0000, u07ih@abdn.ac.uk wrote:

> The major sticky point comes with window manager themes.  We
> obviously can't provide themes for every different window manager,

I'm not convinced that that is the case.  See below.

> as the size of the tarball could become huge - the average E theme
> seems to be around the 500K mark, so someone who uses say
> Windowmaker might get a bit annoyed at having to download a theme
> for E, and a theme for Sawmill, and so on.

I'm not familiar with E themes, but a typical Sawmill theme is make up
of two or three hundred lines of lisp, and numerous .png files.  The
.png files account for most of the bulk of a theme.  I would guess
that the bulk of a 500K E theme would be made up of large pixmaps,
sound files, and other things that could be readily shared between
WMs.  The main thing that could not be shared would be the relatively
small portion that describes how to blend these elements together.
For Sawmill, this is the theme.jl file, which is quite small.

Is this the case with other WMs, or do they really require hundreds of
kilobytes of stuff that would not be of use if a theme were to be
ported to another WM?

-- John Kodis.