[mythtv-theming] Falling back to screens in default-wide

[Michael Rice]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Robert
McNamara<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The fallbacks to default are meant to be last ditch fallbacks so that the
> screen it still accessible.  It's not meant to look great, it just has to
> work.  To work around this, the themer can either:
>
> a) theme all the screens
> b) not use the name names in base.xml
>

Understood.  That means of course that anytime someone adds a new
screen to myth it will be "broken" in every theme until the theme
writer updates the theme.  As someone who wouldn't mind writing code
to implement a new screen and adding some functional (but not
necessarily pretty) default screens I don't think it should be my
business to update every theme.  I have about zero artistic ability
and no idea what the artist intended in his or her theme.

I think this could be fixed by simply changing the
default/default-wide screens so they don't use inheritance.  That's a
bit of work but I'd be willing to do it if it made sense.  There are
probably other ways to do it as well but probably not as simple.
(Maybe reserving all names starting with "default" for use only in
default screens or using multiple base.xmls somehow).

The option b) above is good but Terra re-uses the names and so will
lots of other themes that cut and paste from it.  And unless it is
enforced then it going to be a problem for cut and pasters of
default/base.xml.

Just throwing this out there... Personally I think it would be a nice
improvement.  It seems like a waste of time to go to the trouble to
make fully working default/default-wide screens only to have each
theme potentially botch them up.