Read-Mostly Wherein our intrepid programmer begins to get a bad feeling about this.

So… the way forward appears to be re-building Read-Only as a gem-based theme. I’m mostly following the instructions in Creating Gem Based Themes For Jekyll | Chrisanthropic

The start is easy:

 jekyll new-theme --safe Read-Mostly-Jekyll-Theme
 cd !$
 git commit -m "initial commit after jekyll new-theme"
 RM=`pwd`

I’m going to be flipping back and forth a lot between here and Read-Only, so I’m making shell variables RM and RO. Note the upper case. I don’t want to inadvertantly type rm and messs stuff up.

 cd ../Read-Only-Jekyll-Theme
 RM=`pwd`

I’m wondering…

… whether it’s going to be simpler to add to the freshly-created theme, or take an axe to the old one. My guess is the latter, actually. The main thing you need for a gem-based theme is a gemspec, and that copies over just fine.

As it turns out…

… neither option gets one anyplace useful. It’s evidently a lot of work converting an old template into a new one, and minima (the default) appears to be way different from even the other GitHub Pages themes. Using it tempts one to actually use its layouts.