Shipping a cursor theme with KDE

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

On Thursday 27 December 2007 10:12:03 Tom Albers wrote:
> Op woensdag 26 december 2007 19:51 schreef u:
> > On Wednesday 26 December 2007 17:22:51 Dan Meltzer wrote:
> > > As discussed recently on irc, I feel like it is far too late in the
> > > release process to even considder committing something like this.  We
> > > are ten days before a release, adding something this noticible to the
> > > user with very few opportunities for them to provide feedback is very
> > > irresonsible.  This should wait for 4.1 to allow for more testing and
> > > feedback before a release.
> >
> > As discussed recently on IRC, I repeat me once more stating that not
> > including something that might really improve the user experience with no
> > drawbacks of any kind is rather unwise. Deadlines are put there to
> > stabilize the software, not to block any kind of development.
>
> Hi Riccardo,

Hello. Sorry for the tone of the other mail but I was a bit upset because of 
the recent discussion I had on IRC. :\

> I've read the complete mail and I must say I'm not convinced. We are ~ten
> days before the release and this is not the time to add new features which
> in my humble opinion this is. 

Well, I agree that we should make this release as stable as possible, and I'm 
not for doing anything else, at this point, than just fixing bugs into 
programs and preparing the release for the widest audience.

But cursors are not things like code, that may introduce unknown regressions.

Actually, the point seems to be (at least by a recent conversation I had with 
winterz) is that many people thought this was a request for an exemption to 
the freeze. This is not, this was just a mail to ask how to do this 
*technically*. Else I would have mailed release-team first. =)

The point is that tihs stuff is *only* *pure* artwork. We're working on this 
since june, I'm proposing that now only because just now we've reached the 
point of a very good cursor theme... If you see the first drafts... they are 
not good, not at all!
A cursor must be studied a lot, Pinheiro was the one who mostly opposed to put 
this in KDE before it was good enough.

And I can't understand those points about the freeze just because we would 
introduce a better experience at no cost. Seriously, what can go wrong with a 
cursor theme¹? It's a new piece of artwork like it would be a new Oxygen icon 
that wasn't present before. We're talking about something that *cannot* 
break, so it won't harm the release, in no way! It's only about the final 
user experience, and it would mean shipping a couple of PNG files².
See it as a part of the icon theme if you want. =)

> > Besides, as it has been mentioned on numerous occasions that the
> > so-called ?freeze? does not affect artwork.
>
> I do not agree, it should at least behave with respect to the release
> schedule. We have let the icon changes go in because we wanted it to be
> cleaned and sorted. Although that has broken some applications which were
> using the old icons. This was on the edge of acceptable. But seeing the
> work you all have put it in that was no problem.

Oh man, that's a different thing, is making the namin scheme compliant to the 
fd.o. I plan to do this, but for 4.1, for 4.0 the whole point is adding some 
new artwork. And it does not affect any other part of KDE.

> Anyhow, I think it is not the right time to add a mouse theme. Make it a
> patch for the distro's to pick up or make it available via Get Hot New
> Stuff  (?). I think we can make an exception for 4.0.1 - maybe -, but not
> for 4.0.0.

I will release anyway it on my homepage, along with the other colors which 
won't be shipped with KDE, but really, what I don't understand is this 
unwillingness of shipping it with KDE for some vague fears of unstability or 
what not. Really, this improvement would go in without *any* drawback.

¹ Yes ervin, I know you had some problems some time ago with cursor themes 
that showed up some bugs, but please specify better. You only said that once 
you've seen some problem happen, with no more infos. If you say it like this 
it's like you haven't said anything. I'm using just two subtle animations in 
the whole theme, so I presume it won't be something more problematic than, 
for example, DMZ (default in many major distributions now).

² Well, PNGs and little config files, not that it changes much. ;-)

Bye,
-Riccardo
P.S. (sorry for the crosspost but this thread is a bit spit up between the two 
mailing lists)
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