Mailing List Archive: Falling back to screens in default-wide

Falling back to screens in default-wide

mikerice1969 at gmail

Jun 24, 2009, 2:08 PM

Post #1 of 3 (2809 views)

Having spent some time playing with MythUI I am wondering how missing
screens are supposed to work. As I understand it if a screen is
missing from a theme it falls back to a screen in default-wide or
default. That makes sense since that screen should be fully
functional. But what I've been seeing is screens with elements from
both default-wide and Terra.

The linked example shows a MythFileBrowser which is missing from
Terra. It then uses the default screen but uses the buttons and
textedit widgets from Terra. That obviously isn't something that
looks good together. This happens (apparently) because Terra
implements a basebutton and a basetextedit and the default
MythFileBrowser uses that instead of the default version.

It seems this kind of inheritance makes the default screens not very
useful. Is this intentional? A bug? Or am I missing the point
somewhere? Obviously inheritance in general is a good thing but it
seems not so good in the default screens.

Thanks.

http://home.comcast.net/~mikerice1969/filebrowser.jpg
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Re: Falling back to screens in default-wide [ In reply to ]

robert.mcnamara at gmail

Jun 24, 2009, 2:13 PM

Post #2 of 3 (2699 views)

Permalink

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Michael Rice <mikerice1969@gmail.com>wrote:

>
> It seems this kind of inheritance makes the default screens not very
> useful. Is this intentional? A bug? Or am I missing the point
> somewhere? Obviously inheritance in general is a good thing but it
> seems not so good in the default screens.

The fallbacks to default are meant to be last ditch fallbacks so that the
screen it still accessible. It's not meant to look great, it just has to
work. To work around this, the themer can either:

a) theme all the screens
b) not use the name names in base.xml

Robert

Re: Falling back to screens in default-wide [ In reply to ]

mikerice1969 at gmail

Jun 24, 2009, 3:13 PM

Post #3 of 3 (2676 views)

Permalink

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Robert
McNamara<robert.mcnamara@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The fallbacks to default are meant to be last ditch fallbacks so that the
> screen it still accessible. It's not meant to look great, it just has to
> work. To work around this, the themer can either:
>
> a) theme all the screens
> b) not use the name names in base.xml
>

Understood. That means of course that anytime someone adds a new
screen to myth it will be "broken" in every theme until the theme
writer updates the theme. As someone who wouldn't mind writing code
to implement a new screen and adding some functional (but not
necessarily pretty) default screens I don't think it should be my
business to update every theme. I have about zero artistic ability
and no idea what the artist intended in his or her theme.

I think this could be fixed by simply changing the
default/default-wide screens so they don't use inheritance. That's a
bit of work but I'd be willing to do it if it made sense. There are
probably other ways to do it as well but probably not as simple.
(Maybe reserving all names starting with "default" for use only in
default screens or using multiple base.xmls somehow).

The option b) above is good but Terra re-uses the names and so will
lots of other themes that cut and paste from it. And unless it is
enforced then it going to be a problem for cut and pasters of
default/base.xml.

Just throwing this out there... Personally I think it would be a nice
improvement. It seems like a waste of time to go to the trouble to
make fully working default/default-wide screens only to have each
theme potentially botch them up.
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