On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Frank Richter frank.richter@gmail.com wrote:
So winetheme would have plugins - that seems to make the whole thing an additional complication over straight uxtheme plugins, since you have the application as an extra layer in the middle. And as already said, an application may complicate things such as reacting to theme changes on the fly.
I've been lurking on this thread for a while and it seems to me the problem with themes really is one Wine cannot solve. I don't know if the LSB or FDo specs have a human interface guideline system but it seems to me there needs to be some sort of theme engine bridge or some such at a lower level than WIne that the differing toolkits can use to come close to having a consistent interface even if its not 100% all of the time. I know there used to be back in the KDE2 days support to use GTK 1.x themes but this was before the days of FreeDesktop.org.
The right solution it would seem, if we cannot get proper human interface guidelines for linux, at get a free desktop spec that lays out a generic theme engine any of these toolkits can plug in to or a common file format they can all read at least. Perhaps that theme engine spec should then have a case for output in a format that Wine can understand or Wine's uxtheme and whatever else could be extended to read this FDo theme spec. We already do such a similar thing in shell32 for XDG Folders and the Root unix namespace. Of course this would not address Aqua/OS case but such a spec if adopted by KDE/GNOME/Enlightenment/etc would do wonders for us on BSD/Linux/Solaris/etc.