Re: Notes and thoughts on the GTK+ meeting at GUADEC

[Kristian Rietveld <kris gtk org>]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Alberto Ruiz<aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> 2009/8/14 Kristian Rietveld <kris gtk org>:
> As for theming, I've been discussing a bit with Thomas, Carlos and
> Cody. We have reached some sort of consensus that a backwards
> compatible path is possible adding a second vtable for engines,
> checking the vtable size and working out a structured way to poke the
> scene graph representation. However, we need time to try these things
> out. Thomas pointed out that working on a separate theming library
> makes a lot of sense as it would allow reaching a nice API and it
> would help the special purpose GObject baed toolkits around to have
> proper theming as well (say Nbtk, Glitter...).
>
> So I think that we've reached the conclusion that theming shouldn't
> get in the way of the current 3.0 plans, as we don't have time to
> deprecate GtkStyle and introduce something new all at once
> (eventhough, we all would have loved to make it).

Great to know that progress is being made here.  Trying things out
definitely sounds like a good idea.  Even though we are now not
planning to deprecate GtkStyle in 3.0, we should have an idea whether
"just sealing it" will provide enough flexibility to migrate to
"something new" at a later stage. I think one of the larger problems
has been the hard-coded array sizes of the arrays containing GdkColors
and GdkGCs (but I am not at all an expert on GtkStyle and theming),
and this limitation should disappear in a properly written accessor
function.  Are there more pitfalls that can hold us off from a
successful migration in the future?

> There's the issue of CSS though. Would it be acceptable to deprecate
> gtkrc's in the middle of the 3.0 cycle in favor of CSS theming files?
> This is an area where I'm pretty much blind, prolly Robert Staudinger
> has a better picture than me here, Robert?

Can current gtkrc's and CSS theming files co-exist?

> Now, what I'd love to see is having IRC meetings back, ebassi and
> myself talked roughly about it on IRC, seems that mclasen has a
> toughest schedule these days. Anyone up to figure out hours/date to
> have a 3.0 kickstart meeting and do some rock and roll?

Yes, I agree that would be great.  Maybe we should send out a proposal
for a meeting time and see what people come up with?  I am unsure if
the old time (I actually forgot it) still works for me.


regards,

-kris.