Common icon themes

[Antonio Larrosa Jiménez]

El Viernes, 8 de Noviembre de 2002 17:11, Alexander Larsson escribió:

Hello Alexander,

I've been talking with Dirk Mueller at IRC (I was awake yesterday until 
4:20am discussing different ideas) and we found a much better proposal, so 
I won't answer your questions about the previous proposal and just propose 
you what I think is a much better approach. If in any case, you want me to 
answer your questions, just tell me and I'll try to answer them so that 
you understand better the whole idea behind icon themes.

The new proposal goes like this:
1) Add the "Hidden" key and remove multiple inheritance as before
2) KDE will install a kdedefault symlink in each release that points to the 
default icon theme (crystalsvg for KDE3.1) and GNOME will install a 
gnomedesktop symlink to its own default icon theme (gnome (*) or however 
you call it). 
3) We keep hicolor as a default "neutral style" icon theme, where all 
_3rd_party_ apps must install their "neutral style" icons. Note that when 
I said 3rd party I don't only mean mozilla, acroread, or some other 
desktop neutral app, but I mean apps which are not distributed from within 
each desktop's CVS, but anyway, if you already read the "faq" I wrote, I'm 
sure you already got the concept.
4) When an icon theme has an "Inherits=default" key, an empty "Inherits=" 
key, or no Inherits key at all, it's interpreted as inheriting from the 
desktop's default icon theme ( crystalsvg for KDE, gnome (*) for GNOME).
5) The default icon theme for the desktop (crystalsvg for KDE 3.1, gnome 
(*) for GNOME) inherits from hicolor.
6) hicolor should inherit from the other desktop default icon theme (that 
is, if we're under KDE, then hicolor inherits from the gnomedesktop 
symlink, and if we're under GNOME, then hicolor inherits from the 
kdedesktop symlink).

Of course those symlinks should be removed from the list of available 
themes for the user (mainly because the icon themes are already available 
as real dirs).

Under that scenary, if KDE changes the default icon theme again, GNOME will 
continue finding KDE's icons because kdedefault will always point to the 
right place.

(*) I really would recommend you to not use something like a desktop name 
or a general word like "default" for an icon theme. The basic ideas behind 
icon themes is that they have a set of icons with a common look, and it's 
that look which defines the icon theme, so the name should be something 
descriptive about the look. Note how in KDE we've never called a theme
kde, default, or something else, but crystal, hicolor, locolor, etc.
As I said in another mail, if you use "gnome" to always store the default 
icon theme of gnome, and you ever change the gnome's default look, then 
you would change the look of icons in a given icon theme, which is 
completely against the icon theme concept (at least, as thought in KDE 
around 3 years ago).

Does this new proposal sound good?

Greetings,

--
Antonio Larrosa Jimenez
KDE core developer - larrosa at kde.org
http://devel-home.kde.org/~larrosa/
It's not logical to think that some things are unmovable -- MrSpock.