Current procedure to acquire themes is very inefficient.

[Jarmos-san]

As specified in the "Using Themes" section of the repo, the user has to clone the whole repository which seems redundant IMHO. Downloading a whole bunch of repo amounting to a few 100MB after download doesn't look efficient to me.

Besides, even the instructions in the official documentation appear redundant. If I had to download the themes, the pelican-themes -i path/to/themes willn't work as intended.

So I guess the documentation should at least align its instructions similar to the instructions specified in the README of the repo.

IMO perhaps a more efficient way of doing things without bloating the local repository would be to clone the individual theme & then specifying the path to it in the config file. That way not only are you refraining from downloading a whole bunch of files bloating the local system but it is much easier to follow as well without requiring any CLI commands.

[avaris]

Individual repos will happen... eventually (see this comment). It is a matter of resources (people willing to help, time, etc...).

Back to problem at hand. This repository contains a bunch of submodules, which are already repos of their own. So, if your theme-of-choice is one of those, then you don't need a clone of this repo. You can instead clone that directly.

Ignoring submodules (i.e. no --recursive in git clone), size of this repo is smaller (80MB) but still not that small. If you go to the repo and download a ZIP instead of cloning, you'll get a file about 30MB (unpacked to ~40MB) which is much more reasonable. The difference is essentially git duplicating content in the history and it is an (unfortunate) nature of storing binary files in git.

As a side note: Don't use pelican-themes. pelican-themes -i does some dubious things to pelican installation. In fact, we should just deprecate pelican-themes from pelican. It is not needed at all. THEME = '/path/to/theme/folder' works just fine.

[Jarmos-san]

Wonderful! Glad to see that work on the underlying issue with this repository is being addressed. So I guess rather than cluttering, I'll close this thread & subscribe to #1488 for future reference.

As for the workaround, it took me a while to figure out that I could just clone my theme of choice directly & appending the THEME = '/path/to/theme/folder' works perfectly. Heck, even the official documentation doesn't state that as a way around.

So I just wanted to give a heads up about it that the documentation can be updated until a solid solution to the problem has been released.

[avaris]

... but it is mentioned in the documentation:

... Can be a relative or absolute path to a theme folder, or the name of a default theme...

[Jarmos-san]

Oh, my bad for not clarifying my opinion well enough.

What I meant was to document this way around, officially.

So, if your theme-of-choice is one of those, then you don't need a clone of this repo. You can instead clone that directly.

To rephrase, state it somewhere within the documentation to clone the repository of choice directly & stating the path to it in the configurations using THEME = '/path/to/theme/folder'.

It's convenient from a user's POV & doesn't require them to make assumptions of what will work without any surprises.