Hi, when one goes to try some Plasme themes with Plasma5 from store.kde.org, one also gets a long list of KDE4 times themes. Often those due to their age even have high ratings & big download numbers because their were great at their time. so being listed first in the respective categories in the GHNS dialog even with Plasma5.
At the same time Plasma5 has seen some non-backward-compatible changes across theming, which are only visible on a closer look, but flaw the whole experience (especially given the old themes having high rating & download numbers, so "they must be good" for a user just seeing that). Worse, the old unmaintained themes with their high rankings hide/shadow all those new themes created now by people, impeding the needed feedback cycle between users and theme creators. What incompatible changes, you might ask? I am trying to distill a complete list, to write a tutorial for updating KDE4 times themes to Plasma5 times ones, here a short list of what I saw so far: * "mini-*" panel-background variants got dropped, making non-full-width panels missing their sides * clock hands rotation offset got changed from (0,width/2 to (width/2,width/ 2) * notes background changed to color variants * panel/dialog/window shadows now must be provided by theme, no longer added by windowmanager While there was some initial code to provide backward-compatibility using the "X-Plasma-API" entry in the metadata.desktop file, I have only seen one place trying to use that, but the list above is not handled by that (and also might be hard to). At the same time all the new Plasma5-compatible themes added to store.kde.org do not work on any still existing KDE4 Plasma installations. So the single category "Plasma Theme" as currently present screws both Plasma5, as well as those still left on KDE4 (for whatever reason, and officially now also unsupported by KDE). So, what could be done to sort out all the ancient KDE4 Plasma themes? I am no expert about GHNS. I have also no idea about the ontology used to organize stuff on opendesktop.org/store.kde.org, the items seem a bit random to me (there is "Plasma 5 Widgets", "Various Plasma 5 improvements", but other things are without versioning, despite being version specific like Wallpaper plugins) When not knowning about technical details, I would have proposed to introduce a new category "Plasma 5 Themes", so the name clearly points out what target those themes are for (only). And then shift either automatically any themes uploaded to opendesktop.org over to that new category, if their upload/update timestamp is more recent, or, if possible, the metadata.desktop file could be inspected and has a "X- Plasma-API=5.0" entry. Or rely on the active theme maintainers to shift their product to that new category, at that time also showing a sign of "maintained theme". This would allow a clean restart of the category, giving active theme creators all the proper attention and users only working themes (to what creators managed :) ), with any old cruft left in the old place, but still available there for manual download in case someone wants to pick content and e.g. port it to new Plasma5. Though when looking at the technical details, I see plasma-themes.knsrc from plasma-desktop has "Categories=Plasma Theme" hardcoded, So existing installations will in the GHNS get feeded any content only for that category. And if the Plasma5-compatible themes get removed, the GHNS dialog will only show partially-broken ones. Question: how grave would that be, how many people rely on that? And how quick could an updated plasma-themes.knsrc be pushed out to users, so the main transfer phase might be kept to a few weeks? Would distribution packagers be willing to do out-of-schedule patching of any supported Plasma packages to point to any new category? Who would be the person on opendesktop.org side to assist with any changes? Your thoughts? What alternative approaches would you prefer? Cheers Friedrich PS: I am currently looking into porting Ivan's original Plasma themes Spoons, Glaze & Ascii to Plasma5, in cooperation with him, for some more sane visual alternatives, other than Fluffy Bunny & Unicorn ;) PPS: Also updated tutorials listed at https://techbase.kde.org/Development/ Tutorials/Plasma5#Themes a bit to Plasma5 where I could. Plan to also put there the Port-to-Plasma5 tutorial I assemble while doing those theme porting.
