Just a heads-up: I've mentioned before that I'd like to include some
easy way for newbies to choose a different color scheme, similar to what
color-theme.el does. However, instead of including color-theme.el, I'm
writing an independent implementation. (I haven't been able to get in
contact with the color-theme.el maintainer, and anyway there are just
too many contributors to color-theme.el to track down for assignment.)
This code will be based on the existing Custom theme code, so most of
the heavy lifting has been done.
Emacs looks for Custom themes in .emacs.d and the load path; a theme
named "foo" is looked for in foo-theme.el. I'm currently not sure
whether the default selection of themes distributed with Emacs should be
in a subdirectory in etc/, or in lisp/.
Note, also, that because the package manager adds to the load-path, it
is possible to distribute Custom themes, or collections of themes, as
packages, which is nice.