Future directions

For a long time now, Epidermis has had a fundamental weakness: there just aren't enough themes in its repository.

Currently, theme authors submit themes by creating the pigment files themselves and sending them to me by email. I then manually add the themes to the repository hosted on tuxfamily.org. Obviously, this approach is not scalable at all. Having to ask for my permission and assistance to upload new themes is a psychological barrier to contribution, but most of all, it places much too great a burden of work on me.

I could develop a website that competes with the likes of gnome-look.org, allowing theme creators to independently upload their creations to the repository. But I don't want to compete with OpenDesktop.org, I want to complement it. And for this happen, the theme format must catch on.

So here's the plan: I'm going to concentrate all my development plans on implementing the new cooperating theme format. I'm also going to develop a converter for existing .tar.gz themes. Then I'm going to try and advertise it like crazy, to get theme creators on board. Because I can only support so many things at once, Epidermis 1.0 won't have the automatic repository feature at all. Remember, the goal of Epidermis is to be obsolete, as desktop environments and applications start to implement the innovation themselves.