On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 16:05, Emanuele Aina wrote: > If we have this working we can contact the mantainer of themes.org, > sunshineinabag.co.uk, themedepot.org, etc, asking if they are disposed > to set up an archive for apt-get (maybe helping with technical support > and disk space :) ... I think it is better to have real people working on high quality theme (collection) packages. You find that many themes on websites are bad - they often don't implement all features of the theme (such as borderless windows); don't have licenses; introduce copyright violations; aren't being maintained upstream (make them work with the latest version of the program). We *could* have hundreds of theme packages where the user can choose based on their merits, or we could choose to package smaller selections of themes where every one is of high quality. IMHO, smaller collections of higher quality themes are better. (Do not get me wrong by smaller selections - We should have as wide a variety of themes as possible, but each one must conform to high standards.) I've been working on the metacity-themes package. Currently, there are very few included themes, mostly due to recent changes in the way metacity themes are used. I have been in contact with many theme authors, trying to clarify licenses, get features implemented (mostly those annoying border-only windows) and generally get their approval. Surprisingly, I have had a very positive response from many of these people. They are often very pleased that their work may be included in what they consider a high quality distribution; this has in most cases encouraged them to do more work on the themes, working on problem areas, but also generally improving the theme. Without this contact, the theme would remain problematic and probably wouldn't be looked at again until the author upgrades their system (if ever). Hopefully now you can see why I think maintained packages are better than automatically generated ones. As for other programs, I think it's mainly just a case of finding people willing to maintain packages. Maintaining the packages isn't difficult as much of it can be automated, but it does take a lot of work communicating with many different authors and checking for updates (themes rarely have version numbers). Collaborative maintenance would make the job a lot easier... (let me know if you're interested in metacity themes) > We can be the only distribuition in which it is possible to download and > install a theme with a single command (or click, if you prefer :) Lets get them into the main archive so that people don't have to mess about with all this downloading business -- +----------------------------------------------+ | Mark Howard cam.ac.uk mh344@ | | http://www.tildemh.com tildemh.com mh@ | +----------------------------------------------+
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