[Proposal] Meta themes spec.

[Matthias Clasen]

On 6/11/07, Thomas Wood <thos at gnome.org> wrote:
> Hi Stephan,
>
> Regarding your Metathemes proposal, it all sounds good and
> similar to what we basically have in GNOME already. However, in GNOME
> we use a .desktop style file to describe what the package contains.
> Currently this can be any combination of icon, gtk+, metacity themes,
> and a gtk+ colour scheme string. It can also indicate font names and
> sizes, and a wallpaper (although in the theme manager, these are only
> implemented as "suggestions"). The data for the themes are then kept in
> specified directories within the archive. For the most part, this also
> means that simply extracting the archive to ~/.themes should be
> sufficient to install it.
>
> GNOME has recently introduced a custom mime type to allow easier
> installation of theme packages. However, it has not yet achieved wide
> spread adoption and I think there would be little opposition to
> replacing it with a freedesktop.org specification.
>
> I would be happy to help out with the creation and adoption of a
> freedesktop.org specification for these types of archives.
>

I think the first step would be to describe the existing approach in
some detail,
to see what (if any) changes are desirable to turn in into a freedesktop spec.