Hi, I have previously tried to explain my idea about a uniform packaging scheme for themes. I used to call it MetaThemes, but that led to some confusion with themeing methods and the metatheme project[0].
The idea was to have a single package that includes several themes. Themes for Gtk+, metacity, sawfish, xfwm4, Qt, Kwin, KDE-Theme-manager, icons and perhaps even sounds. Something to bring artists and users together, to allow artists to create a collection of themes building a certain look and users can install that same collection at the touch of a button to get the look the artist designed. Another problem some of us might have encountered before are legal issues. You want to modify a theme and perhaps publish the results but you fail to remember who was the original author, or under what license the theme has been provided to you. By storing extra information regarding the author, the license and perhaps even the version and release-date from each theme-component this might be not so much of a problem in the future. A lot of times themes are revised. Much like with writing a computer program, designing a theme is an ongoing process. By incorporating version-numbers inside the package users can distinguish individual releases with bugfixes and such from the package they already installed. As Thomas Wood already pointed out[1], gnome already has something similar. The format of the gnome-theme-package is described on a wiki[2]. Unfortunately though, this format does not seem to be very flexible when it comes to introducing new themes. This could impose a problem since people are known to replace the default windowmanager of gnome and xfce. When someone wants to make a theme-package, he should be allowed to add a theme for those alternative components too (like sawfish and openbox for example). Thus, the the format should be flexible enough to be component-independent. Quite a challenge. When I first started this discussion on the xfce4-dev mailinglist, I wrote a little spec to get the discussion started, a paper where ppl could shoot at[3]. Although, I did not know that the XdgBaseDir spec[4] is not that widely implemented and I assumed that the theme-location would be XDG_DATA_DIR/themes, something which until this day for most apps still is ~/.themes . I would like you to take a look at the spec[3], and give some feedback :-). Regards, Stephan Arts [0] http://www.metatheme.org/ [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-themes-list/2007-June/msg00005.html [2] http://wiki.xfce.org/gnome-theme-package [3] http://mocha.foo-projects.org/~stephan/meta-themes-spec.html [4] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html _______________________________________________ gnome-themes-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-themes-list
