Máirín Duffy wrote:> The design team has enough time pressures on it wrt to theme as is. This> puts an additional, difficult burden on us to get the theme out even> sooner.
You need to do that anyway. The systematic late tagging of the entireartwork which happened the last few releases is not acceptable. It alsoputs a lot of pressure on us KDE maintainers because we get to come up withKDE implementations of your theme concept in a very short timeframe becausewe don't even have any artwork to work with at the point where the artworkis supposed to be final (final devel freeze). A few of us (primarilyjreznik and me) are willing to work on KDE artwork, but we're no artists,we're developers, we really need actual artists coming up with concepts intime for us to actually do the implementation work.
I'm sorry, but the design team will have to work with the same freezes asall the other teams, the current situation is not tenable.
This issue has been the subject of a lot of frustration on our (KDE SIG)side.
So, while I'm not convinced this idea of working with KDE upstream onartwork is going to really work out (count me as one of the remainingscepticists), the scheduling issue remains there in any case.
> If the Fedora KDE spin would like to branch off and take its own> approach to the artwork and not use the design team's artwork, then that> is a different conversation.
Of course there's also the possible option to work ONLY with upstream KDE'sdesigners and ignoring Fedora's theme entirely. However, this will not leadto a consistent Fedora experience. :-( And at that point I guess we couldjust ship upstream's original artwork and not ask for their help at all.The idea of upstream's plan is to design something which is a blend ofupstream and downstream design elements. How well that'll work out issomething we have yet to see (and that's one of the reasons for myscepticism).
> Besides this, there are some fundamental issues with the proposal:> > - Are these themes going to match oxygen AND tango?
These themes will be for KDE only (Plasma wallpaper, KSplash, KDM, possiblyalso a Plasma theme, the main focus from upstream right now in this trialphase is on wallpapers, which would be used both on the Plasma desktop andas part of the KSplash and KDM themes), there are no plans for KDE to useTango and I think upstream would not be happy if we change the default KDEicon theme away from Oxygen. The whole reason they're doing this artworkplan is that they're unhappy about distros changing too much of the artwork(they even complain about distros changing the menu button from the KDElogo to their logo as we're doing, if we change the whole icon theme,they'll most likely just stop working with us entirely).
> - How is the production of these themes going to line up with X distro's> release cycles? Who gets to be the one with the stale theme?
The themes will be designed for each distro. That said, the theme willcertainly be stale in that it will be based on e.g. KDE 4.3 artwork forF12, but F12 updates will most likely have KDE 4.4 and 4.5. (They certainlywon't be willing to work on 3 themes for every Fedora resp. KDE release tocover all the combinations.) The idea is to blend the latest upstream KDEartwork with the artwork for the upcoming distro release.
> - How do you produce a set of artwork that doesn't clash with X distro's> individual branding styles??
I have no idea how upstream plans to do that. That's why I'm sceptical. ;-)
> - What kind of SLA does the KDE artist team assure us with this service?
Most likely none, they're just volunteers just like you.
> - How much say does the Fedora design team get in the wallpaper design?
That's also something which remains to be seen, though it certainly alsodepends on how willing you are to talk with the upstream designers aboutthings. If you just send us your designs and we forward them to upstreamwith no direct communication between the artwork designers, then of courseupstream will do whatever they want with your design. ;-) But I don't knowhow much influence you can have on the design if you're willing to discussthings with upstream. The idea is new, so there are no returns yet.
Kevin Kofler
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