kdenetwork/kit/icons

[Alexander Larsson]

On 31 Oct 2002, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> cc'ing Alex and quoting lots of text to get his opinion. (He's on a
> plane today though so may take some time.)
> 
> Antonio Larrosa Jiménez <larrosa at kde.org> writes:
> > El Jueves, 31 de Octubre de 2002 17:49, Havoc Pennington escribió:
> > > Antonio Larrosa Jiménez <larrosa at kde.org> writes:
> > > > No, no. _Even_ if you're only supporting >=KDE3.1, apps outside of cvs
> > > > _must_ install their icons to "hicolor". Remember that "hicolor" ==
> > > > "default", so what I mean is, applications must install their icons to
> > > > the "default" icon theme. It's a bit unfortunate that we have to name
> > > > the "default" icon theme "hicolor" (instead of plain "default"), but
> > > > it's needed to keep backward compatibility with existing KDE apps.
> > >
> > > Remember that the icon theme spec is shared, so you don't really want
> > > to call a theme plain "default" (it may not be the default in GNOME or
> > > whatever). "KDE Default" would be a better name.
> > 
> > Well, to quote the draft of the icon theme spec: 
> > (http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec.html)
> > 
> > | In order to have a place for third party applications to install their 
> > | icons there should always exist a theme called "default"
> > 
> > The problem is that if KDE changes to calling that theme "default" then 
> > we'll stop supporting old kde apps which people still use. With the recent 
> > changes I had to do to the KDE icon loader I tried to get something as 
> > similar to what was proposed in that page as possible.
> > 
> 
> Can you write up what you had to do differently? We should document
> that, or address it via spec changes.
> 
> > In any case, that "default" icon theme wouldn't be visible to the user (he 
> > cannot select it from the control center), so there's no problem in naming 
> > it that way (in fact, it's just the directory which is called "default" :) 
> > )
> 
> Ah, OK.


So, my basic idea was this:

We're not ever gonna have a common (e.g. both Gnome and KDE) default icon 
theme upstream, but even if we ignore that can-o-worms there must be a 
way for 3rd party apps (acrobat, netscape etc) to install icons that both 
desktops pick up. Thus the "default" theme that everyone falls back to 
last.

So, the desktop projects have their own default themes (e.g. "hicolor" for 
kde, "gnome" for gnome), which they install most icons to and that most 
other themes inherit from. But both still pick up icons from the "default" 
theme to allow.

Of course, this set up sort of messes up Gnome getting the right KDE icons 
and vice versa, so maybe we want to install applications for KDE/Gnome 
apps that may be used on other desktop environments in the "default" theme 
too.

Opinions on this?

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an obese Amish master criminal She's an enchanted punk journalist with 
the power to see death. They fight crime!