As the style has grown bigger and more complex, generating the different
variants from a common source has been a good decision. However given how
intertwined the theme is with gnome-shell itself, relying on a submodule
has proven to be quite painful. And as things stand right now, it is going
to get worse:
- using either pre-generated CSS or generating it at build time is
odd, and violates meson's strict separation between source- and
build directories; we are therefore considering dropping the CSS
and depending on sassc to always generate it at build time
- with the migration to gitlab, our workflow shifts decisively towards
branches; however there is no support in either git or gitlab for
handling two brances of separate repositories consecutively, which
gets particularly awkward for branches in a private namespace
With those pain points in mind, we will adjust our setup as follows:
- remove the submodule from gnome-shell and instead import the
sass as subtree
- after that, the sass sources can be changed like any other files
in the repository, and regular contributors can forget that there
was ever anything special about them
- whenever we want to update the classic style, we can push the subtree
changes and bump gnome-shell-extension's sass submodule
In other words: Updating the classic styling will become slightly more
painful, but not much and only for me; in return, everyone else can
stop fiddling with submodules (and buy me a beer).
