External apps and theme change

[Ivan Čukić]

Hi all,

Currently, we have two bug reports (that I know of) that are related to 
plasma's theme changing, and parts of the environment that don't react to them 
without restarting them.

KSMServer and KRunner:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181451

Lancelot:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181503

At first, I wanted to make the Lancelot applet send the signal to the main 
application when the theme changes, but when I realized that it affects other 
apps too, I started to think we should have it done inside Plasma::Theme 
somehow.

The first thing that comes to mind would be a D-Bus enabled manager (for 
example org.kde.desktoptheme) that would be instantiated only in the first  
application that uses Plasma::Theme. And other applications would connect to 
it.

The disadvantage is that we loose the manager if that first application quits. 
- maybe some king of fallback - if the original manager is destroyed some 
other Plasma::Theme user becomes a new manager and inherits all clients.

The manager could be fixed to the plasma binary since it is, at the moment, 
the only place where you can change the theme, but that could prove to be a 
bad solution (IIRC plasma-mid is a separate binary and it should have the 
configuration options for theme) and maybe someone wants to use other plasma-
based apps without plasma the shell.

-- 
Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
   -- Leo Rosten