Icons missing

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 6 December 2015 at 13:56, Thorsten Zachmann <zachmann at kde.org> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I use a separate user for running calligra. I use ssh -X to login from my
> normal desktop user to my kde running user. However when I start any
> kde application  I have no icons. With strace I can see it searches for
> icons
> in the hicolor folder instead of breeze.
>

​
Hi Thorsten,
I am with you here. If it's important to have at least the default icon
theme fully working regardless of the actual environment, hard coding icons
to have just one theme is the compromise. This is the direction I am
testing for Kexi. The only icons not owned by Kexi are the absolute fd.o
standard subset (but even this may be distributed on non-fd.o platforms of
course).

Kexi is prepared now for that, uses special prefixes for breeze and
oxygen-like themes.
->
https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=calligra.git&a=tree&hb=HEAD&f=kexi%2Fpics%2Fhicolor

But it gets complex/error-prone. I am close to switching to a qrc files
(one per theme).
This thread shows the past discussion, not the only one I suppose:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kexi-devel/2015-September/000418.html

Moreover when Qt-only libraries pop out from our code (as it's in case of
Kexi) we want them to mix well with non-KDE apps because we want more users.

The question is, why themes?
Complex apps such as Calligra have many special icons [1]. I don't expect
various themes (often originating from the outside of KF5-based
environments) nicely following requirements and maintained for 100%
compatibility. And nobody is to blame, the result is not worth the effort
IMHO.

And I've not seen many things worse than incomplete theme, half-oxygen,
half-breeze for example. So I'd say "never again" and let's avoid such
situation before the first stable release.

A bonus is that it's eventually possible to properly document applications:
screenshots will refer to real default look and feel. (well, for that also
hardcoding Breeze QWidget style is needed :).

[1] https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Calligra/Icons/3.0

PS: It's all about priorities, I'm far from removing freedom. For people
who really love to theme complex apps (1% of geeks?) firefox-like theming
is quite possible: deliver theming extension that injects app-specific
theming. If a theme is broken, then one can uninstall the extension or
request fixes from the author of the extension, not from the application's
team. That's the true nature of the  plugin system - allow to decentralize
the deployment.

PS#2: Before asking about performance. Hello in 2015. Your smartphone and
smartwatch injects and hardcodes icons already. If you read the post via a
modern browser with javascript it eats you 1GiB RAM minimum and your
icons/pixmap cache is 1GiB too. And many MB for the screen buffer of your
1GB+ graphics card all, in an uncompressed format :)
​



> With the help of David Faure I found out the the icons are shown as
> expected
> when I call
>
> export KDE_FULL_SESSION=true
>
> before starting the application.
>
> I think using an application via ssh -X is used quite often and it should
> work
> out of the box with the need of setting any special export. Maybe you have
> an
> idea on how the behaviour can be improved.
>
> Please CC me as I'm not subscribed to the list.
>
> Thorsten Zachmann
> _______________________________________________
> Kde-frameworks-devel mailing list
> Kde-frameworks-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-frameworks-devel
>



-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

KDE:
: A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators
: and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org
Calligra Suite:
: A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org
Kexi:
: A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi
Qt Certified Specialist:
: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
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