On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 10:01 +1200, Glynn Foster wrote: > Hey, > > Shaun McCance wrote: > > I'm going to coin a new term: key churn. This is when people > > make frivolous and unnecessary changes to GConf keys or their > > default values. It sucks for large deployments. Gnome is > > bigger than your personal desktop. > > I don't really care too much about the name change, but what I do care about > is > the migration story between themes as new engines/icons/whatever are dropped > in > and out. This stuff isn't as smooth as it should be - hopefully Calum can > provide details of what currently happens [we documented this for an ARC case > recently].
It seems to go something like this (at least on the 2.15 machine I was using to experiment with it): 1. If you're using an installed theme, and its index.theme file disappears as a result of an upgrade, your current theme will become a "Custom Theme" in the theme capplet. If you then drill down into the theme details dialog, it will initially show as still being comprised of the gtk, icon and metacity components that originally made up that theme, even if they're no longer installed either. But... if you then select a different gtk, icon or metatcity theme, the list is refreshed, and any non-existent components then disappear, which could be a bit of an unpleasant surprise for the unsuspecting user. Assuming you don't try and edit the theme in that way, you'll just get console errors whenever an application tries to render something that would have used any of the now-non-existent theme components, and the default theme will be used instead. Which seems to mean 'gnome' for icons or controls, and 'Simple' for metacity-- *not* the defaults defined by the gconf schemas. 2. If a theme's index.theme file remains after an upgrade, but one or more of its three components are no longer installed, on opening the theme capplet your theme is shown as selected, as if nothing was wrong. When you drill down into the details dialog, though, the behaviour is the same as case 1... the 'phantom' theme components are shown as selected, until you select an alternative instead, at which point they disappear. 3. If a theme engine disappears, you're given no warnings at all in the theme preferences UI, just a console error every time something tries to use the non-existent engine. I guess the 'phantom component' behaviour is actually intentional-- you wouldn't want to permanently switch the user's settings to some different component when the previous one couldn't be found, because they might just be temporarily logged into a machine that doesn't have that component installed. However, the theme capplet UI could probably do a much better job of indicating that the selected component wasn't currently available, and that a fallback was being used instead. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Java Desktop System Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
