custom-themes BAD?

[Dan Espen]

Custom-themes look to me like they are BAD (Broken As Designed).

I'm running Emacs 24.3.1 here and this is what I see in the themes
directory:

  5089 Jan  1  2013 adwaita-theme.el
  6434 Jan  1  2013 deeper-blue-theme.el
  6048 Jan  1  2013 dichromacy-theme.el
  2885 Jan  1  2013 light-blue-theme.el
 40948 Jan  1  2013 manoj-dark-theme.el
  5167 Jan  1  2013 misterioso-theme.el
  7720 Jan  1  2013 tango-dark-theme.el
  7080 Jan  1  2013 tango-theme.el
  3550 Jan  1  2013 tsdh-dark-theme.el
  3357 Jan  1  2013 tsdh-light-theme.el
  3680 Jan  1  2013 wheatgrass-theme.el
  5165 Jan  1  2013 whiteboard-theme.el
  5287 Jan  1  2013 wombat-theme.el

Notice that one theme, (manoj-dark) is way bigger than
any of the other themes.

Looking in these files, I see that each theme designer
decides which Emacs packages he's going to support.
The more packages supported, the bigger the theme file.

I think the fault lies with the base package for fonts
Emacs defines.  The basic faces were the font-lock faces,
builtin, constant, preprocessor, etc.

When we get to packages like gnus, gnus goes ahead and
defines it's own faces:

gnus-cite-attribution-face
gnus-cite-face-1
gnus-cite-face-2
gnus-cite-face-3
gnus-cite-face-4
gnus-cite-face-5
gnus-cite-face-6
gnus-cite-face-7
gnus-cite-face-8
gnus-cite-face-9
gnus-cite-face-10
gnus-cite-face-11
gnus-emphasis-bold
gnus-emphasis-bold-italic

That's the problem, there should be font-lock faces like:

font-lock-bold,
font-lock-level-1 thru 12,
font-lock-large-1,,,
font-lock-blue...
font-lock-reverse

and so on.

All the packages should be using font-lock-* faces as far as
possible.  Then the themes can all set the same set of faces
much more easily.


-- 
Dan Espen