[kde-artists] Resolving icon naming conflicts

[James Richard Tyrer]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Monday 26 May 2008, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
>> I ask you, "immediate supervisors" (quote JRT) to take a look at this
> 
> urg. we're immediate team members, not immediate supervisors =)

That was a facetious remark made to emphasize the fact that there are no 
'immediate supervisors' in a project composed of peers.

>> kdelibs? handles icon loading and the technical side of icon fallbacks.
> 
> kdelibs really has nothing to say about the names of the icons, just the 
> mechanism for loading an icon given an arbitrary name.

Well, yes and no.  If you mean the actual choice of words for the names, 
you are 100% correct since the code doesn't care about the words used to 
name icons.  However, there is also the issue of the logical structure 
of the names (which is the way the code parses the names).  As I said, 
the names are for people and the logical structure of the names is for 
the code.  Obviously, if the names are not logically arranged into tree 
diagrams, then fallback will not work.

>> oxygen? is what i work on, but also affects other themes.
>> kdebase/runtime? has oxygen just as a "minor" part amongst other large
>> pieces of concrete code.
> 
> oxygen is a project of the kde artwork project, and it seems that icon naming 
> as well would fall within the kde artwork project scope.
> 
> as for how to bridge it over to the developers, this is something that affects 
> application developers. in one sense it's kind of like writing a library 3rd 
> parties depend on: you have to keep compatibility going forward so as not to 
> break other people's work that they've already done. so the effort towards 
> develpers is probably pretty low, other than to document additions as they 
> happen (changes are probably verboten?) and to work with k-c-d members who 
> work on KIcon* to keep that infrastructure working.
> 
>> So who's responsible for this area?
> 
> given how it usually works in kde, this seems fairly obvious to me: the people 
> doing the bulk of the work, the people responsible for the design going 
> forward, etc. that would seem most naturally to me to currently include Ken, 
> Pinheiro and yourself; there are certainly others involved with oxygen, 
> artwork and icons, but responsibility lies with those doing and directing the 
> work.

And who is renaming the icons in KDEArtWork?
> 
> in the case of icon naming, as Ken and Pinheiro have also both given you their 
> express approval and, indeed, support in this area, it only seems logical that 
> you would be the person to take maintainership of the icon naming. doubly so 
> since you have been doing the bulk of that work.

This if fine, but what happens if the names chosen don't work with the 
icon loader code.  That is the concern where the developers need to be 
involved.

> and as someone who was involved in that work as well prior to 4.0 (mostly from 
> the coding side though), you also have my support.

Unfortunately, politics isn't going to result in a logically ordered set 
of new icon names, or good new names for old icons.

> it sucks to not have a recognized and active maintainer in a project, so if 
> you want that role it seems to be yours for the claiming =)
> 
>> It also doesn't help that the
>> kde artists module doesn't have an official maintainer listed at
>> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Release_Team#Coordinator_List .

You can put me down as maintainer for KDEArtWork::IconThemes.  I have 
not done any work on any other parts of KDEArtWork so I wouldn't really 
be the one to be assigned to the whole thing unless it was simply to 
fill an empty slot.

-- 
JRT
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