Proposal: preferred-theme-spec - a spec for getting and setting default icon/cursor/sound themes

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Vincent Untz <vuntz at gnome.org> wrote:

> Le mardi 27 mars 2012, à 00:21 +0800, PCMan a écrit :
> > 1. Xsettings is a way to expose the settings to applications. It does not
> > define how you store the settings.
>
> Yes, nobody said it was about storing the settings.
>
> > 2. Xsettings, is actually used by gtk+ only. Though there is a KDE port,
> > it's not part of KDE. In LXDE we support Xsettings simply because we're
> > using gtk+. [...]
> >
> > 3. Every desktop of course has its own way to handle settings, but it's
> > nice to have a common way to specify icon themes and cursors. There are
> > many small programs which are not bound to a specific DE. They absolutely
> > need this. Please, not everyone is using gnome.
> >
> > The purpose of freedesktop.org is to provide cross-desktop solutions
> rather
> > than asking everyone to follow the design of the largest and most famous
> DE.
>
> Hrm, but xsettings is already a xdg spec. That was my point. We can have
> a competing spec, but unless there's a real investigation as to why
> xsettings is not used everywhere, I don't see why the competing spec
> would be more successful.
>
> Vincent
>
> --
> Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.
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I think the point he raised was that there is no xsettings backend for Qt,
which is (afaik) true.
I've read the xsettings spec now but I don't fully understand it. If
someone wishes to propose a modified version of the spec to support
xsettings, by all means. However, I see one main issue for this:

"Xsettings is not intended ... to store complex data types (other than as
strings)"

I take it a list is a complex data type -- one we need in the spec. The
spec follows the common .ini/.desktop format, which supports lists.
I see what it tries to do, but I remain unconvinced it's the best course of
action. Ini files can be read by pretty much every framework -- both python
and qt have their own builtin parsers for it, I'm sure gtk does too
(gkeyfile?), etc.

> unless there's a real investigation as to why
> xsettings is not used everywhere, I don't see why the competing spec
> would be more successful.

FWIS, ini files are pretty much de-facto for configuration. Easy to read,
easy to manually edit, easy to parse, many parser implementations, and most
of all reusable code throughout XDG. XSettings is a foreign format to most
devs and not human readable (I can't even find an example file anywhere...).

But I'm not sure how relevant all this is to this spec. I can see why you'd
want to use Xsettings, but from what I understand it's unable to store the
data we need in the way we need it. Ini files are used all over the place
in almost all xdg specs, hence why it was my first option. Is there any
concern against it?

J. Leclanche
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