Transparent themes without composition

[David Nolden]

Am Sonntag 03 Mai 2009 20:37:51 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Sunday 03 May 2009, David Nolden wrote:
> > @Aaron: I know the real part of this discussion is long over for a long
> > time. Now I just have to defend against all those who are telling to me
> > that the problem I'm having does not exist.
>
> nobody's saying that. what they are saying is that your proposed solution
> is not appropriate.
Ok, so my problem was: "Make non-transparent themes look nice without 
composition".
Most responses: "This doesn't need to be solved, fix drivers, fix ..., fix ... 
instead"

Actually you're the only one who at partially responded to technical the part 
I was actually interested in.

If someone told me "If you want to achieve this, better do it _that_ way, it's 
cleaner" or something like that, I could perfectly live with it. But this did 
not happen.

Even you dowplayed the non-composite users to "secondary targets", and said 
something in the line of "a color is enough, it doesn't need to look all that 
good" instead of telling me how I can achieve my goal of making the non-
composite user a first-class citizen.

> > But for now I have one important recommendation: Do not allow using
> > transparent themes without composition. When composition is disabled and
> > the theme does not have an opaque version, switch to another theme that
> > is opaque.
> >
> > Right now, transparent themes without composition make plasma look just
> > broken.
>
> hm. see, i suggested a way to make this better. you did a bunch of work
> that could have been used to do that. yet you didn't. you instead decided
> to go off and do your own things despite being told _in advance_ that it
> would be accepted. you then went and committed those changes anyways,
> twice. this would all be made much simpler and everyone would be at least
> bit happier with the non-opaque svg's being given a background colour when
> there is no compositing.
This is the exact issue that I actually wanted to discuss on this list, but 
due to all the "fix the drivers" that I explicitly tried not to trigger, this 
discussion didn't happen at all.

So I'll try it again:
The core point:
Painting a color behind the transparent SVGs has _exactly_ the same problems 
and the same limitations like additionally also painting a pattern there. When 
you already paint the color, then the pattern doesn't cost anything. The code 
to paint the pattern is nearly fully within Qt. The only difference: You can 
make it look a lot nicer than without the pattern. I would feel very bad if I 
had to remove those very influential 10 lines of code with the only reason to 
make the code simpler. if you want, I will refactor some other parts of plasma 
to save 10 lines of code, and we're even. ;-)

I have grown to the conclusion that this whole "paint something behind" thing 
is ugly, but I just cannot see the significant reason why you would allow a 
color, but not a pattern.