Icon parameters in *.desktop files

[Jakub Steiner]

Hi there,
Here's a few notes from an artist's point of view.

Can't give any feedback on the speed implications, but the proposed
Provides= functionality would really help me, as a theme author, in the
following situations greatly:

      * To escape the hell of never ending mime-type icon additions, I
        could provide a list of mime types a single icon could be used
        for. The current generic fallback works well in some cases, but
        fails in many (lots of audio and image types are in fact of
        application/* sort). Symlinks are really hard to manage in the
        current build system.
      * A single icon work can in different contexts. This works as long
        as all themes respect the same metaphore. If you delegate the
        definition of the icon to the application .desktop file you
        don't give the theme author the freedom to pick a better
        metaphore. As soon as the icon object changes, it may not be
        usable in all the defined contexts. If you have the Provides-
        functionality as the icon metadata, the theme author can
        redefine these.

But as I cannot evaluate the speed implications, these may not be
relevant in the end.

cheers

-- 
Jakub Steiner <jimmac at novell.com>
Novell, Inc.