GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 533611
add notification themes to the metatheme format
Last modified: 2008-07-15 18:24:37 UTC
Ubuntu ships their own theme for notification bubbles, and Fedora has just gained a notification bubble theme as well. I think it would be nice to have the appearance capplet map a new metatheme key, NotificationTheme, to the gconf key /apps/notification-daemon/theme. I don't think we really need UI for this, at least my patch doesn't add any.
Created attachment 111065 [details] [review] patch
Created attachment 111067 [details] [review] slightly better patch The revised patch resets the notification theme to "standard" if the metatheme has no explicit value.
Wow, I realized I almost exactly reproduced a patch that was wontfixed in bug 359751. You can take this fact either as a hint for a actual need in this area, or use the bug ref for your duping convenience... Fwiw, I agree with the principle sentiment that it would be better if the notification daemon didn't have its own little theming sandcastle, but since the prospect of that being redone in a better way are probably slim, I'd like you to reconsider this in the name of improved user experince.
I am the developer of the Fedora theme and I think the chances of notification daemon not having it's own theming sandcastle are really low, as Matthias mentioned. What the *engine* (it's actually an engine, being it also a theme is a bonus thing, one can say) actualy does is that it creates all the necessary gtk stuff requested by the daemon (create and display main notification window, icon, buttons, count-down timer, display priority, message text, etc.). Most of that can be themed, and actually is themed, using the gtk engine, we can also reuse colours set in the gtk theme, BUT what we cannot reasonably do is using *just* gtk engines to make the bubble window itself look like we'd like. In order to have rounded edges, one needs to change the window geometry (if compositing is turned off), one needs to display arrow - and again change the window geometry. IMHO, this is out of reach of gtk engines. From user perspective different notification daemon engine = different notification bubbles theme, and as such it would make sense to be part of the gnome metatheme. And no, we cannot guess what notification daemon engine to use based on what gtk engine/theme we use, since these two engines are orthogonal. Just my 0.02 €.
As I mentioned on the mailing list, we should probably make sure libnotify/notification-daemon is in the release module set (or at least a blessed dependancy) before making such a change.
Since it should be completely transparent to non-notify-aware systems, I don't think we need towait for that to happen. What would be the advantage of having the daemon (or the library) in the release set? All we (the capplet) are going to do is fiddle with GConf. (Note that Matthias' patch is incomplete, though. appearance-themes also needs to handle notification themes when creating custom themes.)
Created attachment 114544 [details] [review] handle custom themes
Thanks, committed.