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

[Reece Dunn]

2008/11/3 Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com>:
> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Roderick Colenbrander
> <thunderbird2k at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Anyway desktops will never move to this microsoft format.
>> I think both gtk and qt are now moving to xml based formats.
>> We could define our own spec for that but I doubt they will move to this.
>
> Right, I doubt we can have any influence on them.
> That's why I think we should focus on the most
> superficial kind of compatibility, i.e. just supporting
> Windows theming and providing theme files that
> make us look not so jarring.

I was not proposing that Gtk and the other frameworks adopted the
msstyles format (which has changed in Vista to an unintelligible
binary format).

What I was proposing, after some discussion, was standardising at the
*API* level. Something that would be acceptable with (and have the
buy-in from) the toolkit writers and key applications. The various
toolkits would still use their current formats for those themes. Wine
could then use this standardised API,

Alternatively, there could be a Universal Theming Engine that does the
same thing. That would be an external project that provides bindings
to at least the major theming engines available, but such that
applications can use it to simplify their code. Wine could then use
this external library.

But Dan is right, the first step for Wine is making the
uxtheme/msstyles support work well so that it can be used by
distributions to theme Wine.

Another thing that potentially needs resolution is that Vista has
added support for theming menus, but this will require us to use the
new binary msstyles if Wine intends to properly support this without
adding our own custom extensions to the XP format. This is where
deeper integration will help: an XP msstyles theme will not support
menu theming, but a native theme will.

> I doubt we can ever do automatic theme extraction.

Agreed.

- Reece