Re: Slow application startup when using a theme

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 10 Jan 2012, at 04:54, Eric Wasylishen wrote:

> I didn't like the current approach either…  I just committed a rewrite of how 
> theme images are handled which gets rid of theme proxies entirely, and 
> eliminates the code in -[GSTheme activate] and -[GSTheme deactivate] which 
> were setting/restoring images.
> 
> Now, when a name is set on an NSImage instance, it also subscribes to the 
> theme change notification. When an NSImage receives this notification, it 
> does the name-to-path lookup again that +[NSImage imageNamed:] did, and 
> reloads itself (discarding all reps) if the path has changed.
> 
> It's a fairly major change but I tested Gorm, GSTest, SimpleAgenda, and tried 
> switching between the GNUstep default theme, Neos, and Etoile's Nesedah theme 
> while the apps were running, and all images seemed to update properly.

The proxy approach was done so that cached references to images and copies of 
images would change when the theme changes, and we wouldn't need to go through 
the codebase changing all applications to either refrain from caching/copying 
named images, or be theme aware and refresh cached images when a theme changes.

Unless you've done something I missed, this rewrite will have broken theming 
for any code which caches images rather than fetching them by name each time it 
needs to draw ... but this may not be an issue any more (we may have rewritten 
all such code to be theme aware by now) in the GUI, and being realistic, there 
are probably few enough gui apps that copy system images in existence, that we 
can ignore them.
But ... it would make sense to go through the GUI  code and look for any 
remaining cases where the change will have broken things (or just wait for bug 
reports I suppose).