Icons installed by apps

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Thanks for advice David.
In the specs I see no mention about using share/{app}/ subdirs.

I also noted this: "It is recommended that the icons installed in the
hicolor theme look neutral, since it is a fallback theme that will be
used in combination with some very different looking themes."

For the record:
Well, we can't have everything. The above advice somehow worked when
most themes had colours. For technical reason (the lookup algorithm)
breeze-themed icons go to hicolor but breeze is absolutely not
neutral. It may fit to some flat-design based desktops such as GNOME 3
but not everywhere. Combined with, say, older-school colorful icons,
UI elements containing breeze icons look like disabled ones or just
out of place.
No idea what LXQt default theme will be; obviously it wouldn't be good
if on desktop that migrated to Qt, Qt-based apps looked out of place.
To be clear, it's often about 2 ot 3 custom icons in a small app that
are not portable, still its noticeable.

I am back to the idea of defaulting to uniform cross-platform look
(with platform-specific twists if time permits) and leaving option for
motivated contributors to contribute with theming extensions.
I'd say since Winamp theming support rarely has even a minor priority
in "real world" software projects...

(Document-level theming is entirely different topic, and I guess
highly useful one - still we don't have it even started)


On 24 September 2015 at 23:04, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 22 September 2015 18:44:47 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>> On 22 September 2015 at 14:17, Jaroslaw Staniek <staniek at kde.org> wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> > A couple of related questions while wrestling with issues such as [1].
>> >
>> > Let's assume Kexi app installs some icons to
>> > PREFIX/share/kexi/icons/oxygen/32x32/places/ or
>> > PREFIX/share/kexi/icons/breeze/32x32/places.
>> > Can these be searched by the icon engine?
>>
>> Sorry for adding more info to clarify.
>> UserIconSet is deprecated so I guess this functionality is deprecated too...
>> since QIcon::fromTheme() apaprently isn't able to find app icons.
>>
>> I've seen quite a few KDE apps compiling-in their (usually custom
>> action) icons into qrc instead.
>>
>> I've not seen other app that do what Calligra apps do:
>> using icons fron share/calligra/icons (in kdelibs4 times
>> share/apps/calligra/icons).
>>
>> Comments?
>
> I guess qrc is actually better. Otherwise app1 might start depending on icon installed
> by app2 (without really noticing). And this simplifies deployment (and speeds up lookup).
>
> What I don't know however is whether artists consider that these icons should be themeable...
>
> BTW did you look into the xdg icon spec?
> I guess it's not there?
> On the other hand it doesn't prevent doing it since it's not about sharing icons; it's just harder
> to convince Qt to look there :) (I think qiconengine and kiconengine should stay compatible,
> so that we can even consider switching to qiconengine one day).
>
> --
> David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
> Working on KDE Frameworks 5
>



-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

KDE:
: A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators
: and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org
Calligra Suite:
: A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org
Kexi:
: A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi
Qt Certified Specialist:
: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek