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


From: Quentin Mathé
Subject: Re: [RFC] [PATCH]: Icon themability patch for -GUI images/icons
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 08:26:50 +0100

Le 31 oct. 04, à 21:41, Fred Kiefer a écrit :

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 ...

ok
For the icons themes, I don't remember, may be I wasn't around at this time.

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.

I haven't followed very precisely this thread because I don't use xlib most of the time. I will take a closer look at this thread.

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.

Well, that's really not fair, I understand that it is very irritating when you have to handle such human behavior.

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.

True, but it happens in many projects.

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.

Programmatically GNUstep is extremely themable (but there is still improvements I think, the graphical part of some classes like NSBrowser are not what I would call clean), but for the end user it isn't or it isn't in an easy and user friendly way. If we are talking so much about themes, it is because it is important from the marketing side (personally I don't specially appreciate the current look). When you said "None of this ever gets used", it is because except for the colors list, the themes creation is complex (a theme needs to be implemented by a developer)… By taking this fact in account, Nicolas Roard is using the things like GSDrawFunctions to create a user oriented themes framework which will permit to create themes (pixmaps themes included) with zero lines of code because graphists are rarely developers, to use them very easily by having them packaged etc.… It's not fair to state that GNUstep is perfectly themable currently, when you know the work done by Nicolas (still to be released). For the icons themes it is the same problem, even if there are no lines of code in this case to write, the actual solution is totally not flexible and not user friendly, that's why I come with my proposal yesterday (because in my opinion the Alex Perez patch missed the point).

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....

Well I agree with you here, it is sometimes really boring to hear people wanting whatever feature without taking the time to write the code, or people ranting about the code written by someone without coming with something better or helping the original developer to fix his code. Many people are using -gui, but something like five persons are implementing stuff which is committed, and somedays you are sad when you see this fact.

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.

The code cleanup is really boring but that's what is making the difference, I know it because of NSComboBox (I should say I haven't had the time to polish the cleanup :-)). I plan to do some more cleanup in the following months when I will have the time : NSTableView, NSBrowser for examples.

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.

In my opinion, lot of things are improving, on my side I would say I have committed code which is not really nice like NSWindow+Toolbar, but I needed to start with an implementation and to work some time on it to see where the weak points are and how to fix them… Well I plan to rewrite NSWindow+Toolbar because it is now really possible since the NSWindow decorations patches by Alex M. are applied.

Thanks for you reply and sorry if I annoy you sometimes with things which looks repetitive or misplaced :-)
Quentin.

--
Quentin Mathé
address@hidden





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