Common icon themes

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 03:47:24AM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote: 
> This is what I will do:
> 
> * Document the changes in the file format (add Hidden, remove multiple 
>   inheritance).
> * Say that when the inheritance chain ends (due to no Inherits line, or a 
>   named theme that doesn't exist) implementations must insert "hicolor", 
>   and are also free to add other themes.
> * Change the references in the spec from the "default" theme to "hicolor", 
>   and change the default theme tarball into a hicolor theme tarball 
>   (icon-themes-base.tar.gz).
> * Add a section to the standard about how application authors are 
>   supposed to install icons (something in "hicolor" and optionally in 
>   other named themes).
> * Don't mention anything about symlinks in the spec.
> 
> This means any 3rd party app following this will work in both KDE and 
> Gnome, without any special-casing. Gnome apps will also follow this, so 
> they will just work from KDE. KDE apps not in CVS will apparently also 
> follow this, according to previous discussion, so they will work from
> Gnome.
> 
> Then I will add some KDE-specific application icon loader APIs to the 
> Gnome icon loader, which follow the default.kde symlink. This API will 
> only be used by the panel and Nautilus, and only when the normal icon 
> lookup didn't work. This way, Gnome can read KDE CVS application icons.

I haven't followed the whole discussion, but this outcome seems pretty
Dumb (tm). Doesn't it bother anyone that KDE CVS apps work differently
from all other apps? How could that be a good idea?

It would seem to me that we must have a standard default theme where
all apps are guaranteed to install some icon, and then all other
themes are optional and contain overrides for that standard default
theme.

Havoc