KDE's handling of icon theme contexts

[Niko Mirthes]

Hello,

I've been working on the Tango Desktop Project in my spare time with an eye 
toward having the Tango icon theme work on KDE. Part of this project is the 
recently proposed Icon Naming Specification. A number of KDE developers have 
indicated that KDE intends to make use of this specification, including the 
people working on the Oxygen icon theme. One problem we've encountered 
involves KDE's hard-coding of icon theme contexts.

While I'm not programmer by anyone's standard, I've managed to create a couple 
patches that allow use of all of the icon contexts proposed in the naming 
standard to date. The patches can be found here:

http://straw.sh.nu/kde/kdelibs-new-icon-theme-contexts-4.diff
http://straw.sh.nu/kde/kdebase-new-icon-theme-contexts-4.diff

or at kde-look.org:

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=32288

While these patches are functional, I don't think they're the best solution.
I've discussed how to best handle icon theme contexts to some extent with 
Kenneth Wimer and others in #kde-artists on the freenode IRC network. So far, 
it seems ideal to have the icon contexts read either from an icon theme's 
index.theme itself or from a configuration file, rather than having them 
remain hard-coded as they are now. This would allow for the addition or 
removal of icon contexts depending on their usefulness to KDE.

It would be great to see this happen during the KDE 3.5.x time-frame as it 
would make use of the naming specification by icon theme authors much
easier and allow them to test themes in time for KDE 4. However, I realize 
this is rather unlikely and realistically I see this as a possible goal for 
KDE 4.

I look forward to your comments.

Thank you,
        Niko Mirthes