Icon mess

[George Kiagiadakis]

Hi,

I started looking at our icons earlier because there were some
conflicts with oxygen-icons in the debian packages I created, and I
have found a few things worth mentioning and/or discussing. Brain dump
follows...

I took a look at what icons we have, what icons the CMs request and
created a table here [1]. After this research, I noticed we are
shipping some extra icons that are not used (im-bonjour, im-meanwhile)
and I removed them in a branch [2]. Comments welcome.

Regarding the icon theme: we must not install anything into the oxygen
theme. This is just wrong, for two reasons:

1) Icons will later be provided by the oxygen theme as well, so we
have conflicting files (as in the case of my packages).
2) The users may choose not to use oxygen as their icon theme, in
which case they will have no icons in tp-kde applications.

The right place to install application icons is either in
${DATA_INSTALL_DIR}/<appname>/icons or in the hicolor icon theme
(reference [3]). Since we are using them from many applications and
not just one, the correct approach in this case is to put them in
hicolor. So, I took the first step and changed the "kde-telepathy"
icon to be in the hicolor icon theme in my branch [2]. The same should
be done for the rest of the icons, but I am wondering whether we
should prefer copying oxygen icons or kopete icons in this theme.

Regarding the "kde-telepathy" icon, the name is pretty bad. Dashes in
icons create a sort of group, which behaves like that: If the icon
requested exists, it is used, otherwise, the last part after the last
dash is dropped and the rest is used as an icon name, and this is done
recursively. So, if I request an icon "im-foo-bar-baz", KIcon will
first try this name, but if it doesn't exist, it will then try
"im-foo-bar" and then "im-foo" and finally "im", until it finds one
that exists. If none exists, it falls back to the questionmark icon.
In the case of "kde-telepathy", if the icon doesn't exist, it falls
back to "kde", which obviously exists, and it's not really good for
our purposes. I would prefer it to be "telepathy-kde", which would
fall back to "telepathy", which is way better (it doesn't really
exist, but if it existed, it would be a better choice than "kde").

I hope I am not forgetting anything...

Regards,
George

[1]. http://community.kde.org/Real-Time_Communication_and_Collaboration/Icons
[2]. http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=clones%2Ftelepathy-contact-list%2Fgkiagia%2Ftelepathy-contact-list.git&a=shortlog&h=refs/heads/icon-mess
[3]. http://techbase.kde.org/User:Pino/Handling_icons