“Recently” I’ve been a huge fan of the Dust GTK theme. It’s one of the few themes that combines both dark and light elements nicely (without it looking too out of place on my wmii desktop).
I’ve been using it for over a year now, and I haven’t really had any issues with it, bug I regardless decided to update it yesterday. Newer is always better right? Well, no.. not always.
I started to restart the GTK based applications I had running and I was greeted with the horrendous theme which is the default one:

Oh boy, first point of update regret earned. Like any sane person my next step was to fire up gtk-demo under a terminal so I could check for potential errors:
Midkemia /home/haste
3252 ~ % gtk-demo
/home/haste/.themes/Dust/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:79: error: unexpected identifier `arrowstyle', expected character `}'
My initial thought upon seeing this was obviously: Syntax error?! In my theme?! So my next step is to take a look at the theme’s gtkrc:
--------------->8---------------
engine "murrine"
{
animation = TRUE # FALSE = disabled, TRUE = enabled
arrowstyle = 1
border_shades = { 1.2, 1.0 } # gradient to draw on border
---------------8<---------------
Well, that does look fine. I do notice that the theme uses the murrine gtk-engine, so it’s time for a version check:
1111 ~ # cave show gtk-engines-murrine
* x11-themes/gtk-engines-murrine
::compnerd 0.53.1 0.90.3* {:0}
::installed 0.90.3 {:0}
x11-themes/gtk-engines-murrine-0.90.3:0::installed
Homepage http://www.cimitan.com/murrine
Summary Murrine GTK Engine
So that’s up to date according to my package manager, but what does the release site say? Arrowstyle is on the development list and the latest version is 0.90.3. The SVN repository linked also shows the same version. Luckily for me I remember that GNOME has migrated from SVN to git, and surprise surprise! A updated version is located over at their git repository.
I clone, compile, install it and BAM!

That was an hour or so well spent… At least I’ve gathered up enough regret points to not update my GTK theme in a while.