Plasma Themes (for all plasma devs)

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 18 April 2008, Ivan Čukić wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I had to put the "for devs" note since I suppose many of you started
> to ignore the messages that contain the term 'Theme' since the contest
> started. :)
>
> When I look at the Plasma codebase, it seems very well thought of -
> like if this was Plasma 2 (a rewrite of plasma with most caveats avoided),
> and not the firstborn.
>
> The only thing that doesn't look like it had been given a lot of thought
> is theming.
>
> The reasons behind this impression are:
>
> - more and more rendering /hints/ in the SVG files.
> - inconsistency between hints - hint-stretch-borders and hint-tile-center
>   (one hint is for turning on the stretching, and the other one is for
>   switching it off)
for these two looks like it's needed some kind of config file
> - more and more groups in SVG file (81 different groups for panel - quoting
>   Nuno on this one)
> - more and more prefixes
to quote Nuno also here, when someone says that svg can be stretched it's a 
freaking lie, because what looks good at little sizes doesn't look good at 
big sizes and so the opposite, and when you change the aspect ratio horrible 
things happen
so a strange hack like PanelSvg is really needed unfortunately, because it's 
the only way to make a scalable think to look decent and it has 9 items, so 
if you have an image that needs say 4 composed items like this you will need 
36 elements (groups of who knows how many elements) every one with a 
specified unique name and then starts the nightmare
for instance thinking about the taskbar and /me runs away screaming (tomorrow 
will return on it with some actual ugly code)

i really don't see a solution, beside renouncing to theming in many places :(

Cheers,
Marco Martin

>
> And still, there is so much that can not be done with this ever-growing
> implementation of themes.
>
> In our last discussion on this topic, I was generally on the 'it is just ok
> the way it is now' side because I thought that we will not wish for the
> more advanced themes.
>
> Now, when I see that we will have 81 different groups only for the panel's
> background, I have to ask whether we can do this in a more elegant way.
>
> Cheerio! :)