Integrate GTK4 and Xfwm from other active fork?

[achadwick]

I found https://github.com/robson-66/DarkCold a while back. It's another active fork of the @originalseed, er, original that's had some GTK4 and Xfwm4 port love added to it.

Yours is a pretty active fork too, and perhaps has the most continuous history. Seems more like the continuation of the theme you find downstream on Debian deployments to me.

Is there any way you could integrate @robson-66's work here, and maybe collaborate to help keep this theme alive? The licenses are fully compatible between your fork and theirs, and the styles for window decs are similar.

Also, I've not looked deeply yet, but will you be maintaining the darkmint, darkfire, and darkblood variants here too? The Debian maintainers ought to be told where to get new versions from, and I think a new active branch with lots of DE support would be worth them following. I'd be happy to do that (it's just a bug report, after all) if everyone currently working on it agrees enough to make one fork or other the official repo (or forks a collaborative project for it :D)

To clarify the README on the other active fork, you don't need an environment variable to support GTK4. That's just for apps using libadwaita and it's really just a debugging trick that everyone's ~abusing~ quite correctly using to work around the absence of proper theming for that product.

See also

• https://github.com/originalseed/darkcold/issues/16
• https://github.com/robson-66/DarkCold/issues/1

Apologies for the noise. I've only just found this fork :spoon:

[AndreiMiculita]

Hey! I wasn't aware Debian uses it, nice to hear. I'd be happy to integrate @robson-66's work.

I'll check the diffs between the repos next Friday and then we can start integrating GTK4 and XFWM. I'm not sure of the best way to proceed after that (in particular credits/commit authorship), but I'll decide after getting an idea of how much work it'll be.

I started this repo because my PR on the upstream repo got no replies, so I presume it's abandoned. I don't recall looking into the other variants, will also do next Friday.

[AndreiMiculita]

Update: I've had a look at the differences between the repositories. I found that either there are extra changes, or the repo https://github.com/robson-66/DarkCold is forked from an older version of the original because there are some files that are different in the directories gtk-2.0, gtk-3.0 and gtk-3.20. While I was only expecting the directories gtk-4.0 and xfwm4 to be new.

Unfortunately, the git history on the new project was discarded so the histories are unrelated, making a merge more difficult. So other than adding the directories gtk-4.0 and xfwm4 to this repo (with possibly mismatched assets), there isn't much I can do (in a short time) to merge them.

For example, the file gtk-2.0/Scrollbars/stepper-left.png looks like this on the original: (added in 2017) while looking like this on @robson-66's fork: (added in 2021)

And I'm not sure which one to take. If there are aesthetic changes that deviate from the original, it'd be good to get an overview as I was only expecting a port to GTK4/XFWM (and I greatly favor the aesthetic of the original).

[AndreiMiculita]

There's also the option that I build a new GTK4 theme by taking the .css files from @robson-66's fork and using the assets of the original repo, then doing something similar for the xfwm theme. I'll look into that tomorrow but it probably won't be trivial.

[originalseed]

Hi all, I have made light changes to the master branch to align headerbar and close button with Metacity. If anyone has any contributing changes, please make a PR.

[AndreiMiculita]

@originalseed Hi! I've made a PR on the original repo to contribute with a new "unmaximize" button. Have you had a chance to look at it?

P.S. It might be good to have a 2nd maintainer that can accept PRs, since I've had that one open for over a year. If you're looking for volunteers I'm open to doing it.

P.P.S. Also thanks for accepting the PR on the Cinnamon theme!