Mimetype Icons (Was: Shared mimetypes + activation)

[Alexander Larsson]

On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 06:56, Waldo Bastian wrote:
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> I was pointed to
> http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-February/003391.html
> 
> Which says
> "I think the mime type spec hints about a way to do this mapping, but i
> don't know if anyone is using that. Gnome is not at least, we use a
> slightly different mapping.
> 
> Mimetype image/x-foo maps to gnome-mime-image-x-foo, and if that doesn't
> exist it looks for gnome-mime-image."
> 
> Which indeed seems to be the mapping used in GNOME 2.6

This is indeed the case. 

However, our artists have complained a bit about this. Say you're
writing a new theme, completely different from the default theme. If the
new theme isn't as finished as the default one, you won't have icons for
all image/foo type, but you do have gnome-mime-image (i.e. the fallback
for image/*). Now, for icons with no specific icon in the new theme, but
with one in the default theme we'll use the default theme icon instead
of the fallback icon which matches the theme better.

I'm not sure what to do about this. One could imagine looking up first
the specific and then the generic icon in the current theme, and then
looking it up in the parent theme. However, for some things like
text/x-csrc it might be better to use a non-matching icon than getting
the generic text icon for a lot of stuff.