Re: gnustep compared to other toolkits

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

While I cannot speak for other developers, my take on this issue is as 
follows -

I'm not going to work on this, but I welcome contributions from those 
who wish to.

For contributed code to be distributed as part of the GNUstep 
distribution it must -
1. follow the GNUstep coding standards
2. not break things
3. not render code overly complex/unmaintainable.
4. have copyright assigned to the Free Software Foundation

The GNUstep libraries already provide a basic infrastructure for GUI 
customisation -

1. NSInterfaceStyle provides a framework for selecting the desired look 
and feel.
2. NSBundle allows you to keep big chunks of any code you need to use 
separate,
loaded only as required.
3. NSUserDefaults/system colors provide a little customisation already.

You can either use those facilities, and contribute code to support your 
desired theme,
or you can look at providing a more sophisticated general purpose theme 
mechanism.  The
latter is obviously a better objective, but my feeling is that it's far 
more difficult
than it initially appears and would be a major project.