~/.themes [ Was Re: Icon Theme Spec and Cross-desktop Themeing]

[Rodney Dawes]

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 20:24, Wesley Leggette wrote:
> Hi. I'm just trying to draw a couple of conclusions from this thread. If
> you don't mind, Rodney, can you answer a couple questions for me.
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> So, let me see if I understand this. New applications (Is this just GTK
> at Qt at this time?) should use ~/.themes, not $XDG_DATA_HOME/themes?

New applications should follow the spec. Currently ~/.themes has nothing
to do with Icon Themes. The problem I am trying to solve, is that the
Icon Themes are not in the same locations as say GTK+ and Metacity
themes. Others aren't either, but those are separate issues, and don't
have specs either, afaik.

> Also, I'm concluding that the reason for this is because support for xdg
> may not be complete, so you just want these apps to at least use
> ~/.themes for now, and a change-over to something else may be possible
> in the future. Is that correct?

XDG is by far incomplete, but that has nothing to do with my choices. A
changeover in the future will be much simpler than it is now. I just
want to get Icon Themes in a similar structure as at least GTK+ and
Metacity themes, if people are going to be shipping them all together.
This is also by far one of the most miniscule parts of the thing I am
trying to do.

> Can you elaborate on what a rollover would look like if it were done in,
> say, around the time of 2.6 or 2.8? What and how many pieces of code do
> you think would be affected?

Assuming the code I am working on actually gets into GTK+ 2.4, adding
support for using XDG_* will be unbelieveably simple. However, I think
the primary goal of the original thread has absolutely nothing to do
with the physical location, but rather, to standardize the naming of the
icons used in themes, such that we can have the same icons on all
desktops. Doing this now is much more important, because, if we don't,
it will just balloon into a bunch more random icon names that people
have to create 30 copies of the same icon, for 30 different apps that
all do the same thing. It's really starting to get cumbersome for the
artists. :(

> And finally, will ~/.themes be hard-coded, or a env variable?

~/.themes is already hard-coded. If any additional environment variables
are used, they will (should) be the standard XDG_ ones.

> Thanks again for your time,
> Wesley Leggette

Thanks for reading my mail before replying, :)

-- dobey