[mythtv-theming] Theme inheritance or 'fallback' theme

John P Poet jppoet at gmail.com
Wed May 2 16:30:41 UTC 2012


On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Chris Pinkham <cpinkham at bc2va.org> wrote:
> I want to get an opinion on whether people see a feature
> as having any value before I investigate it further.
>
> I've mentioned in IRC several times about an idea I had about
> allowing theme inheritance or the concept of a 'fallback'
> theme that would be used before falling back to default or
> default-wide.
>
> It's a simple concept so I worked up a patch last night to
> test the theory.  Basically, a theme would be allowed to
> define a <fallbackTheme> tag in themeinfo.xml.  The
> fallbackTheme would be added to the search path before
> the default-wide and default theme directories.  This would
> allow a themer to create variations on a theme by just
> creating a new directory containing at a minimum a themeinfo.xml
> and base.xml.
>
> This would allow a lot of different scenarios without having to
> duplicate everything in the base theme, here are a couple
> examples:
>
> - Base 16:9 theme and -narrow 4:3 version
>  - the -narrow version could just redefine .xml and use the
>    images from the base
> - Base theme and -blue, -red, -green variations
>  - the -COLOR versions could just supply some different images
>    or .xml depending on what colors were changing.
> - Base theme and -over40 version
>  - the -over40 version could just have changes to the .xml to
>    use larger font sizes.
>
> I think this might make it easier for new themers to play with
> things because they only need to override .xml and image files,
> they wouldn't have to start with a full copy of a theme and
> hacking away.

Interesting idea.  If someone downloads a theme which uses
<fallbackTheme>, the system would automatically download that
dependency as well?

John
-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?


More information about the mythtv-theming mailing list