[mythtv] Theme Discrepancies

[Matt]

On 9/9/07, Rob Smith <kormoc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/9/07, Matt <skd5aner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Here's a few recent examples:
> > http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-commits/2007-September/032457.html
> > - Only did GANT, Blue, and default-wide.
> >
> > http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-commits/2007-September/032459.html
> > - Only did minimalist-wide and Titivillus.
>
> Well, this is a kinda bad example. Both those commits are related, so
> it's updating all 5. Second, it's a display/flow change, which is
> optional. Most themes follow a certain flow idea and honestly, I would
> feel rude if I updaed Mr. Juski's themes myself when it's something
> like that, but that's just me.

Sorry, I really didn't dive that deep... it's just an overall concern
that I wanted to bring out for some discussion since I've seen some
changes in that area lately.  Also, there are more than 5 themes that
are distributed withing /mythtv/themes and myththemes.

mythtv/themes:
Blue
Default
Default-Wide
G.A.N.T
Classic (?)
DVR (?)

myththemes/:
Iulius
Minimalist-wide
MythCenter
MythCenter-wide
Retro
Titivillus

That's 10 (possibly 12) core distributed themes.  That's not counting
the 6 Justin has contributed in the "themes/" folder.

themes/:
blootube
blootube-wide
blootubelite-wide
neon-wide
ProjectGrayhem
ProjectGrayhem-wide

So, overall that would be 16-18 themes that are packaged and
distributed as part of mythtv.

I can also understand your comment about changing someone else's
theme.  Themes are more of an art, and in open source projects,
changing someone else's idea of art can be a little harder to
convience yourself to do rather than changing someone else's code.
However, this is open source and if someone contributes something that
then becomes part of trunk, then why not keep things up-to-date?  I
know Justin has mentioned that he welcomes all patches for his themes,
in fact he hopes people will help him out with the workload.  I'm very
happy with what he's contributed, but should we expect every change to
land completely on his shoulders?  If so, then why is it part of
mythtv trunk to begin with?

>
> My opinion is that if you require every optional theme component to be
> added to all the themes, you'll just end up with it being thrown in
> there where-ever, not in the best plce, and that would be worse in my
> opinion.
>
> ~Rob

That's a fair opinion, but that also means that you'll have themes
with various functionalities, features, etc.  I like the concept of
lite themes versus full themes, but think about changes like the one
that Daniel put in the other day:
http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-commits/2007-September/032285.html

Seems he did a fair job of getting most of them, but he left the
others for other people to get.  What if no one else does it?  Will
people have to switch to one of the themes that was fixed?  But what
if that theme doesn't have another item in it from another change, etc
and so on...

Really I guess it just boils down to what the standard and practice is
for any change which might impact a theme.  I've seen some over the
years where a dev will say "I use this theme, and I made this change,
so if you want it in any other theme, you'll need to do that yourself"
and that's what concerns me.  I'm happy to say, that those comments
are few and far between, but rarely do I see a change apply to every
single theme that's available via trunk.

Thanks!
Matt