Common icon themes

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Antonio Larrosa Jiménez wrote:

> You'll then note the problem that in this case, a desktop cannot find icons 
> used by other desktops because they're installed to the icon theme in use 
> by the installed desktop release (crystalsvg for KDE 3.1), which may 
> change in different releases. To fix this, KDE is using a symlink 

You only need to fix this because you special-case KDE CVS apps. If they 
were treated as any other app things would just work. From the view of 
Gnome, applications from KDE CVS are just third party apps like any other 
third party apps.

> approach, that specifies which icon theme it's using. This way, we have a 
> default.kde symlink which points to the default icon theme of KDE, gnome 
> should install a symlink called default.gnome pointing to the icon theme 
> that contains the default gnome look, rox should install a default.rox 
> symlink, and so on.
> Just following those links for the appropiate apps makes each desktop find 
> the default look of each other desktop.
> 
> Now on the _why_not_ using hicolor for everything:
> 
> 1) Think of the situation where a desktop (e.g. KDE or GNOME) installs all 
> its icons to hicolor:
> 
> You get (for example) a filesystems/folder.png icon and a 
> mimetypes/html.png icon that would conflict with the icons from other 
> desktops (KDE and GNOME both wanting to install their icons there).
> 
> So this is not possible.

So nobody proposed it.
 
> 2) Another situation is when a desktop installs just the apps icons to 
> hicolor (as Alexander proposed):
> Leaving aside the problems I already said with this (duplicated icons or 
> some icon themes splitted over different icon theme directories, which is 
> non-logical IMNSHO), I saw a new problem with this (and an important one 
> if we want to cooperate). Suppose an user shares the directory where he 
> stores his background desktop files between KDE and GNOME (imho, we should 
> work on making that possible so that if someone wants to use GNOME and 
> then KDE and then GNOME again he gets the same desktop icons in the 
> background of his screen). Now he adds an icon to access quickly one of 
> his directories, so he chooses to use the devices/pda_blue.png icon under 
> KDE. How will gnome find that icon if it's not an app icon? (supposing 
> gnome doesn't install a pda_blue icon). I mean, for the panel menus, it's 
> clear that the icons will be stored in the apps directory, but what about 
> devices/filesystems/mimetypes icons that could be used in the desktop 
> (background) ? Those won't be found, so this solution fails one of 
> Alexander requirements.
> Of course, if we install all our icons (apps, filesystem, mime, etc.) to 
> hicolor, we're back to situation number 1, which we already said wasn't 
> desired.

As I mentioned in my proposal, if we in the future standardize more common 
usage of the icon theme spec the common icons have to be properly 
namespaced and default icons have to be put in the common namespace (i.e. 
the hicolor theme). 

If the user manually sets something to an icon that only exists in the 
theme he uses in KDE and then logs in to Gnome and use another theme I 
don't think that is a problem of the theming system. The same thing would 
happen if he picked an local image file, and then logged in on another 
machine that didn't have that file.

Furthermore, if we really want to solve the situation you describe above, 
you have to look in the default.* themes every time you look up an icon 
(when the normal lookup fails), which means that all desktop icons share 
the same namespace, breaking my requirement nr 2.

> If we could reach a consensus on the default look of icons in gnome and 
> kde, that would be great. But in real life I'd say that's impossible, so 
> we have different default icon themes for each desktop, and a 
> desktop/vendor/look-neutral "icon theme" called hicolor (Note that I've 
> put "icon theme" between quotes because it's not a real icon theme, 
> as it doesn't include icons as basic and fundamental as html or txt mime 
> icons, folder filesystem icons, etc. and its icons don't have a common 
> look, which is a requirement for something to be called icon theme).

There is no need to have a common look for icons. There is a need to solve 
the case when an icon theme doesn't have a specific icon in it (because 
e.g. the app was made after the icon theme was released). This is not the 
common case and it's ok if the icon doesn't fit in the current theme. In 
the normal case all the icons you typically use are in the theme you've 
selected (i.e. crystalsvg).

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an otherworldly voodoo paranormal investigator trapped in a world he 
never made. She's a provocative winged opera singer living on borrowed time. 
They fight crime!