Icon Theme Spec and Cross-desktop Themeing

[Rodney Dawes]

On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 07:30, Craig Drummond wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 17:23, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > This is an initial mail to warn you all that I'm working on a
> > > proposal for updates to the Icon Theme spec, and to solicit
> > > complaints against the current revision, or suggestions for
> > > improvement. Currently my proposals exist of the following:
> > > 
> > > - Adding support for the ~/.themes tree
> 
> Does this have to be ~/.themes? Another stupid hidden dir! Why not
> $XDG_DATA_HOME/themes?

As I understand it, XDG_DATA_HOME is just a hidden dir. Hidden
directories are not stupid at all. And ~/.themes is not adding
another one. It already exists, and themes are put there. I don't
see why we should not put more themes there. It's not like themes
are transient user data, that they need constant visible access to
in the file manager or the command line. Themes are simply configuration
mechanisms. We could move them all to XDG_DATA_HOME, but that would
require a lot more work than initially moving the icon themes to the
same directory structure as themes initially. Perhaps later on, we can
move all themes to XDG_DATA_HOME, (assuming it is ~/.config, as stated
in another mail in your icon themes thread). Once all the themes are in
a central location, it's easier to to move them all, than to have a
large dispersal of different locations to deal with. I don't have the
time to write a general theme spec right now, but we need one. I will
be making some patches to glib and gtk+ for the 2.4 release to make all
the theming stuff more abstract, so that people can easily support
themes in their applications or libraries or whatever. From what I
can tell from the web site, I need to do this by Sept. 1, which is the
hard feature freeze date for 2.4. Either way, I don't believe your
proposal is a solution to the overall problems of theming the desktop.

-- dobey

PS: Please don't reply to the top thread as a reply to a subthread, as
it is confusing, since you change the topic of the subthread for no
reason. Thanks.