Re: [RFC] [PATCH]: Icon themability patch for -GUI images/icons

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Quentin,

Quentin Mathé wrote:
> Le 30 oct. 04, à 17:16, Fred Kiefer a écrit :
>
> > Sorry, I am actually getting bored of this and most other 
> > pseudo-discussions going on in the GNUstep mailing lists. Perhaps I 
> > should think about dropping out of them.
>
>
> Could you explain what you mean here ? … or tell us what are the 
> pseudo-discussions you are talking about ? I would like to know to avoid 
> such position on your side and have more friendly and progressive 
> discussions.

nice of you to ask. I was refering to the fact that we already had a 
similar discussion on icon themes before and to the discussion on 
anti-aliased fonts for xlib and to bits of the discussion on the windows 
backend and ...
You see, with the change I made for AA as the default in xlib most 
people that will see any difference are now worse off than before. (I 
explained why in a mail already) Still some argued very hard to get this 
default setting. I just don't understand them, and to be honest I don't 
want to understand them any more. This is not about making GNUstep a 
better environment.
Or the statement in the discussion about what isn't working for the 
windows backend. Someone, and it may be the same someone, claimed that 
the pasteboard may not be working. He didn't even state, that it isn't 
working, which just means that he doesn't really care. But than, why 
bring up the topic? For me the windows backend hasn't been working for 
various reasons over the past few months, still I could always tell, 
what was actually broken and sometimes even how to fix it. BTW, it is 
still broken for me for all applications which only start a menu and not 
a window.

One basic pattern of these pseudo discussions seems to be that somebody 
states, that if a single feature would be added to GNUstep, than it 
would suddenly attract loads of users. Theming is one of these features 
that pop up from time to time. I am not against themes and theme support 
in GNUstep. GNUstep is already more themable than anyone, to my 
knowledge, exploits. You may change all the system colours by supplying 
a different system colour file. You may change most icons, by just 
editing the nsmapping.strings file. You may change many aspects of 
controls by overwriting the GSDrawFunctions class in a bundle. None of 
this ever gets used.

It may be that I have been hanging around in this mailing list for to 
long. The same arguments come up over and over again. And there is so 
much serious work still untouched....
For my own contribution to GNUstep, I am not that much proud on the new 
features, that I implemented (although there have been a few), but on 
the cleanup of code I did over the years. Now sometimes I even have the 
feeling that GNUstep may be degrading again. I know this is not actually 
true, still I get that feeling.

Fred