Octopress Themes and */custom/* files

[TheChymera]

I noticed that a lot of themes are mainly created by editing /sass/custom/* or /source/_includes/custom/* files. This is a rather horrible way to go about making themes - as it makes it hard for the end-user to keep his customizations and the actual theme apart. I believe this is also a bit detrimental to site responsiveness (as stuff gets overridden a lot) and generally not a particularly hack-friendly way to organize an Octopress theme.

To give you an example of a theme I contribute to which is in part improperly written (until I get around to fixing it) - check out whitespace pre-4f36a35e70. Here's one pull request of mine which exemplifies the problem.

As far as I can tell this is not because theme designers want to do a messy job, but rather because this seems like the most straightforward way of editing a theme. I think the Octopress design should emphasize how */custom/* directories are for quick-n-dirty end-user customization and how themes should actually edit theme files in /sass/ and /source/. I think an easy way to do this would be to make the rake install function ignore any */custom/* files and instead create standard commented files in those locations for the end-user to edit.

[Kernald]

Creating standard commented files in custom directories is not a solution: what if the theme don't use the same variables? I agree themes shouldn't be defined using custom/* files, but they should be allowed to provide their own.

[TheChymera]

Then maybe add a notice in all */custom/* files that when creating a new theme all of their content should be commented out? I'm open to any kind of suggestions, my point was just that this is an octopress theme problem which can probably be fixed by the default theme design.