Wine integration with native (Gtk, Qt, Cocoa/Carbon) themes

[Steven Edwards]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Frank Richter <frank.richter at gmail.com> wrote:
> So winetheme would have plugins - that seems to make the whole thing an
> additional complication over straight uxtheme plugins, since you have
> the application as an extra layer in the middle. And as already said, an
> application may complicate things such as reacting to theme changes on
> the fly.

I've been lurking on this thread for a while and it seems to me the
problem with themes really is one Wine cannot solve. I don't know if
the LSB or FDo specs have a human interface guideline system but it
seems to me there needs to be some sort of theme engine bridge or some
such at a lower level than WIne that the differing toolkits can use to
come close to having a consistent interface even if its not 100% all
of the time. I know there used to be back in the KDE2 days support to
use GTK 1.x themes but this was before the days of FreeDesktop.org.

The right solution it would seem, if we cannot get proper human
interface guidelines for linux, at get a free desktop spec that lays
out a generic theme engine any of these toolkits can plug in to or a
common file format they can all read at least. Perhaps that theme
engine spec should then have a case for output in a format that Wine
can understand or Wine's uxtheme and whatever else could be extended
to read this FDo theme spec. We already do such a similar thing in
shell32 for XDG Folders and the Root unix namespace. Of course this
would not address Aqua/OS case but such a spec if adopted by
KDE/GNOME/Enlightenment/etc would do wonders for us on
BSD/Linux/Solaris/etc.

-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo