codergeek42

So, I finally got off my lazy bum and decided to be productive. I've finally finished the first incarnation of the website for my CurvyLooks theme.

You all know you want to check it out. =)

As you can see from the site, I've released version 0.3, whose only change is to include a proper index.theme file and incorporate the tarball as a GNOME Theme Package (.gtp). The theme itself is otherwise not changed. I will push an update for this to Fedora within the coming days.

CurvyLooks version 0.2 is released! This release fixes the tooltips' shading and also adds a dist rule to the Makefile to make my life slightly simpler when creating the tarballs, et al.

I thought the name was mildly inventive, as it's just in time for Fedora 8's release.

I've also uploaded a package, for the purposes of formal review and (hopefully soon) inclusion into Fedora: bug 367871. After speaking with ivazquez on IRC, we've decided to retire the old "Big Pack" package as of Fedora 9.

So, now's the time! Go download it!

I'll push a new point-release with a fix for being able to install it through GNOME's theme capplet, once I can properly figure out how to do that. I'm nearly there! Worry not! =)

For a long time, I had been a user of Billy Cantrell's Clearlooks_Cairo-Curve GTK+ theme, and its elder non-Cairo equivalent before then. However, as the maintainer for its packaging in Fedora (as part of the "Big Pack"), I've become rather frustrated with the apparent lack of any upstream activity: The website has disappeared and no contact information remains. Much of my packaging was working around bugs in the theme, and making it forward-compatible in slight ways.

In lieu of just being lazy and continuing to patch it like mad, I've decided to fork it and create a new theme, called CurvyLooks, whose primary goal, while similar to the original in maintaining a Bluecurve-like color scheme, is to track modern Clearlooks features (such as Cairo and the current "Gummy" style), thereby aiding in keeping the desktop aesthetically-pleasing, especially over prolonged amount of computer usage.

The first release, affectionally called "I Hope I'm Doing This Correctly," doesn't contain much of a difference from the original by Billy Cantrell, but this will surely change in due time as cool features are added and modified/enhanced in Clearlooks.

The tarball is available from my webspace for download:
curvylooks-0.1.tbz2, along with a SHA1SUM file to verify that your download is correct.

A package for Fedora is currently mostly complete. It's already past 1 AM here, so I'm probably going to get that done tomorrow (...or later today as one might see it.) Now I will answer some questions that you may have in a pre-emptive fashion.

Q: What effect will this have on Fedora's "Big Pack" packaging?
A:I have emailed Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams (ivazquez, the previous maintainer of this package in Fedora) to see if he would like to take its maintenance from now on. Should he choose not to do so, I intend to maintain the gnome-theme-clearlooks-bigpack package through the entire Fedora 8 cycle; but it will probably be mostly bugfixes and whatnot. My intent, if he does not wish to continue its maintenance, is to retire it for Fedora 9+.

Q: Your Makefile sucks.
A: That's not a question...but it's probably very true. This is my first real attempt at being the so-called "upstream" for a project. While I have attempted not to commit the various mistakes I've learned as a packager that upstreams often do, this is my first major Makefile that hasn't been a simple gcc/g++ invocation. I'm still learning this stuff. Please bear with me.

Q: How can I help?
A: Any contributions are welcomed. Packaging, testing and bug-reporting, patching and fixing various aspects of it, etc. are all greatly appreciated.

Q: Okay...so how do I report a bug? How do I contact you?
A: Until I can get a mailing list properly setup, just post a comment to my blog here and I'll do my best to resolve the issue in a timely fashion.

Q: What dependencies does this have?
A: The only necessary dependency is a recent (2.12+) version of GTK+ and the Clearlooks engine.

Q: What other theming do you suggest?
A: I prefer this with the Tango icon theme and Clearlooks Metacity decorations, as can be noted from my comment in the README contained in the tarball. :-)

Q: You're stupid.
A: No; just insane.

Any other questions/comments/fixes/whatever should be posted as a comment here. Thanks.