ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alexandre Abreu <alexandre.abreu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,


On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 1:44 PM, Robert Schroll <rschroll@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 5:04 AM, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Apparently it is now best practice to scoop this up and pop it in the
>> click package of the application rather than reference it from the file
>> system, either way, your application is locked for all time to version 0.1
>> of Ambiance. If the phone grows some UI for changing the theme then some
>> core apps might change but your HTML5 apps won't pick up the changes
>> because they are still pointing at the old theme. If you change to a high
>> contrast large font accessible theme then your applications won't change.
>> We can't develop new themes as click packages and get the whole system to
>> respect the theme, each application will do it's own thing.
>>
>
> Allow me to add some context, as I understand it.  Last October, the HTML5
> theme was in bad shape.  There were a number of bugs and it was not being
> kept up with the QML theme.  This left HTML5 developers with three bad
> options:
>
> 1) Live with the problems and hope they get fixed soon.  But there had
> been only 8 commits in the previous six months (three of which just
> updating the changelog), so this seemed a bit optimistic.
>
> 2) Monkey patch fixes onto the existing styles, and hope that things
> didn't break when the system styles got fixed.
>
> 3) Make a local copy of the styles and fix those.  If and when the system
> styles got updated, the developer could merge those in intentionally,
> avoiding breakage.
>
> The third option seemed the least bad to me, and I said so at the October
> sprint.  Judging by how quickly the HTML5 team agreed with me, I suspect
> they had reached the same conclusion themselves.


That sounds about right, ...

As you said, since then the css/js has since then received a bit of love
with quite a bit a bug fixing ad polishing for the system wide installed
theme. Our goal was to get it in proper work order so that most of the
hurdles are not there anymore and to basically keep it that way (hurdles
free),

Also, it is not in our priority at the moment to expand the support to more
theme or to have a more extensive support for theme switching (more on that
later).

We could revisit some of those bits if we are met with enough interest and
we obviously welcome contributions with open arms, this project in
particular is very contribution friendly.

We might *fix* the theme layout to make things more manageable in terms of
theme selection (sounds like a low hanging fruit) and make it more future
proof, this seems like a reasonable thing to do anyway and I will take a
note to try to tackle that,

Regarding the mechanism to have a system wide theme selection, this is
something that we can tackle once we have something that is in better shape
in terms of structure, and I can think of easy mechanisms to add there,

--
Alex