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

[Wesley Leggette]

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?

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?

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?

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


Thanks again for your time,
Wesley Leggette










On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 09:00, Craig Drummond wrote:
> > This list wasn't around back then. And please stop arguing with me.
> 
> And? My point was that we shouldn't be adding more. Why should I stop
> arguaing? You want to create a spec that mandates $HOME/.themes - instead of used
> the base-directory spec, and using $XDG_???_HOME/themes. Thats the *whole*
> point of my argument! That you are hard-coding where something should be,and
> haveing *no* flexibility!
> 
> > Then go arrange your marriage and stop arguing. :)
> 
> Well someone has to make the point! I originally started because I looked at
> the freedesktop specs, and found 2 that used hard-coded hidden dirs in $HOME
> 
> > GTK+ isn't the only thing with a schedule. And no, if you do one thing
> > now and ten later, you won't necessarily get more breakage. In fact, I
> > am specifically avoiding that. It also seems rather daft to do it now,
> > when the distributions don't have any implementation of the spec, and
> > there exists no reference implementation, for something that is supposed
> > to cover a lot more than just the dot files in your home directory. The
> > issue here is not as big a problem as you make it out to be. People are
> 
> If its not a big problem, then fix it.
> 
> > going to end up with a large directory listing no matter where you put
> > the files, if they intend on doing ls -aF. They'll just see ".desktop"
> > or whatever, and start looking in it's subdirectories. 
> 
> But surely the idea is that the themes, icons, thumbnails, fonts, and
> whetever sub-dirs will be accessed / managed by some GUI tools anyway. Its just
> when they do a dir listing in Konqueror/nautilus they won't see as much hidden
> config stuff.
> 
> > You misinterpreted everything I said. XDG_CONFIG_HOME is *for*
> > configuration. I just suggested using it. XDG_DATA_HOME is for
> 
> Again your arguaing over specifics - I'm just saying have it under *some*
> env var...
> 
> > application data, such as themes. You are wanting to solve the
> > larger problem by solving part of a much smaller problem. It
> > just seems backward to me. Whether ~/.themes or XDG_DATA_HOME is
> > used for themes, you still end up with the same number of dot
> 
> How? Example:
> 
> DESKTOP=$HOME/.desktop
> XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$DESKTOP/config
> XDG_DATA_HOME=$DESKTOP/data
> XDG_CACHE_HOME=$DESKTOP/cache
> 
> So I had:
> 
>     ~/.config 
>     ~/.themes
>     ~/.thumbnails
>     ~/.fonts
> 
> I now have:
> 
>     ~/.desktop/config
>     ~/.desktop/data/themes
>     ~/.desktop/data/fonts
>     ~/.desktop/cache/thumbnails
> 
> Only 1 top level hidden folder.
> 
> > > 
> > > Well if its under a env var then I can set up my desktop as (for example
> > > *only*):
> > > 
> > > $HOME/.desktop
> > > $HOME/.desktop/config         $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
> > > $HOME/.desktop/data            $XDG_DATA_HOME
> > > $HOME/.desktop/data/themes
> > > ...etc..
> > 
> > You are entirely missing any point of this discussion. And technically,
> 
> Nope - you have missed *my* point. Which is why I created the new thread -
> as you asked. And I can't do the above if your are hard-coding ~/.themes!
> Which is my point!
> 
> > proposing to create more dot directories in it. Your discussion has been
> > nominally unrelated to the original thread.
> 
> Hence the new thread!
>  
> > > Yup I've already thought about doing this. For example, I've alread
> > changed
> > > KDE's code to move $HOME/.gtkrc-kde to $KDEHOME/share/config/gtkrc
> > 
> > So how about a reference implementation for the Base Directory Spec,
> > then? Something we can get the distributions to use for their next
> > releases?
> 
> For what? About moving ~/.icons and ~/.thumbnails - when I get time I do
> plan to change these, and send to this list...
> 
> > A lot of people are fed up with dotfiles also. That doesn't mean you
> 
> So why are *YOU* creating more??????
> 
> > have to reply to e-mails, apparently without reading them, and argue
> 
> Um, I have been reading your emails - you just keep avoiding the one and
> only point I'm making.
> 
> > -- dobey
> 
> Craig.