Common icon themes

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Antonio Larrosa Jiménez wrote:

> > > > Well, to quote the draft of the icon theme spec:
> > > > (http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spe
> > > >c.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.
> > >
> 
> Sorry, I forgot to answer this question.
> The only thing that I added was a boolean option "Hidden" which specifies 
> if an icon theme should be hidden to the user or not. In case the icon 
> theme is hidden, then it's not shown in the control center and the user 
> cannot select it. We've so turned hicolor to be hidden from now on.

Do you want this added to the spec?
 
> > 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.
> 
> No, that's not (completely) correct for KDE anymore.
> We have a default icon theme which is currently called crystalsvg where we 
> install all of our icons. The Inherit key in the icon themes index.desktop 
> file now just mention "default" instead of "hicolor" as before. So, when 
> reading that value, we interpret it as the default icon theme (crystalsvg 
> currently). That way all applications are able to find all icons.
> 
> Now you may wonder, where should applications install their icons to?
> well, there is where hicolor come into scene. All 3rd party applications 
> install their icons to hicolor which is inherited by the default icon 
> theme (crystalsvg) and only by it. It would be ideal to rename hicolor to 
> default, but given that we want to keep backward compatibility with 
> existing KDE 3.0 based apps, we have to keep the hicolor directory name.

So, basically Gnome is hosed, and won't be able to show any icons for KDE 
apps? (since we don't resolve "default" to something else, and have a real 
"default" theme.)

I'd like to work with you to resolve this in a way that can make sense for 
more than KDE.
 
> > Of course, this set up sort of messes up Gnome getting the right KDE
> > icons and vice versa, so maybe we want to install icons for
> > KDE/Gnome apps that may be used on other desktop environments in the
> > "default" theme too.
> >
> > Opinions on this?
> 
> Well, my biggest problem with getting common icon themes is that we need to 
> use a "neutral" directory (currently KDE uses the 'kde-config --path icon' 
> directory which is usually something like $KDEDIR/share/icons, etc.), so 
> when we change to that neutral directory, we're going to loose the 
> backward compatibility (we may use symlinks, but that will be a problem 
> with current users with installed gnome and kde desktops)

$KDEDIR/share/icons is gonna be /usr/share/icons on many distribuitions. 
That looks pretty neutral to me.
 
> Btw, I wrote a paper where I tried to explain the changes I did in the last 
> days to the icon themes. You may find it interesting, it's at:
> http://devel-home.kde.org/~larrosa/iconthemes.html
> 
> Btw, I'm afraid I don't know much of the current state of icon themes in 
> gnome 2, are they working in the stable release ? or will they work in the 
> next stable release? (in that case, at least you don't have to keep 
> backward compatibility yet).

We have some code in the Gnome 2.0 code to read icon themes, and it sort 
of works, but it's not used much yet (although it works for e.g. the 
gnome menu if you set it up). For Gnome 2.2 (target january) we're gonna 
use icon themes a lot more. 

If we don't solve this now we're gonna end up with two incompatible icon 
theme formats that look almost identical and install in the same 
directories.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a fiendish overambitious cat burglar on the edge. She's a cold-hearted 
hypochondriac widow operating on the wrong side of the law. They fight crime!