How to do post-4.0 icon naming changes

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Sunday, 20. January 2008, Hans Meine wrote:
> On Dienstag 15 Januar 2008, David Faure wrote:
> > > (c), if performed as pure renaming without further measures to be
> > > taken, will break icons that work fine in 4.0. Which is probably not a
> > > good idea in terms of backwards compatibility. Apart from that,
> > > benefits galore.
> > >
> > > My personal preference would be (c) with some smart mechanism that
> > > shows icons when they are requested but not in the icon dialog or among
> > > valid icons in the theme folder... that would need some smart-ass code
> > > solution, though. (Ideas on how to do that are highly appreciated!)
> >
> > It doesn't need to be "smart-ass" :), but a simple mapping file could be
> > read by KIconLoader in order to keep behavior compatibility indeed.
> > Just a file with
> > kde-4.0-icon-name kde-4.1-icon-name
> > kde-4.0-icon-name kde-4.1-icon-name
> > ...
> > and a QHash<QString,QString> in the code.
>
> Note that this would only work if you update the code and all icon themes
> along.

You must not be required to update the code, that's the point behind all of 
this. As for updated themes, I would say that can be regarded as intended.

New icons in the core theme have always required 3rd party themes to be 
updated, and for applications that use new icon names, those are essentially
"new icons" (even if there a similarly looking icon existed before). Also, 
that way we can urge icon themes to include the more "correct" icons, which 
is a good thing imho.