oxygen icon name clasheroo

[Harald Sitter]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 10:08 AM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 March 2016 15:57:45 Harald Sitter wrote:
>> Hola!
>>
>> Our most awesome icon maintainers wanted to carry over icon symlinking
>> from breeze to oxygen, alas that turned up a whole slew of
>> compatibility problems.
>>
>> examples:
>> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360605
>> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360510
>>
>> # Problem
>> In kde4 software people used oxygen as the standard icon set and
>> installed their own icons there. Since breeze covers all icons ever,
>> replicating its coverage into oxygen means we have a million conflicts
>> with (older?) tarballs of existing software that also install icons
>> into oxygen under the same name.
>>
>> # Proposal
>> We could get rid of this and all future conflicts if we shift the
>> default oxygen icons into a subdirectory.
>>
>> So, we install the default icons to
>>
>> $prefix/share/icons/oxygen/base/22x22
>> $prefix/share/icons/oxygen/base/32x32
>> $prefix/share/icons/oxygen/base/...
>>
>> applications can thus continue to install to
>>
>> $prefix/share/icons/oxygen/22x22
>> $prefix/share/icons/oxygen/32x32
>> $prefix/share/icons/oxygen/...
>>
>> without conflicting with our base files what so ever.
>>
>> Downside of this is that the index.theme basically needs to list
>> everything twice (once for base and once for main directory), which
>> unfortunately incurs a bit of a runtime overhead. This is a bit of a
>> crap situation we are in and I can't think of another solution to
>> this.
>
> This doesn't sound like it matches the freedesktop.org icon theme spec.

How so?
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec-latest.html

Directories
list of subdirectories for this theme. For every subdirectory there
must be a section in the index.theme file describing that directory.

e.g. Directories=base/32x32/actions,32x32/actions

and then Table 2. Per-Directory Keys

[base/32x32/actions]
Size=32
Context=Actions

[32x32/actions]
Size=32
Context=Actions

> But if you rename oxygen/base/ to oxygen, and oxygen/ to hicolor, then it does, AFAIK....

We can't really change oxygen/ at all, that's kind of the problem.
Since existing apps install stuff into oxygen/ and expect it to be
used by default in a kdelibs4 context. What we could do is make
oxygen-base a standalone theme and link "oxygen" with "oxygen-base"
through inheritance.
That's not quite as good though because we want to override
application icons through the actual theme. So what we would need is
"oxygen-base" to be the selected theme and then inherit "oxygen"
(where apps install icons) to be the fallback. Since the uid of a
theme is its folder name and we can't feasibly change that without
breaking something that's not really useful either.

That said, we could go down the two theme route and simply accept that
applications that install to "oxygen" will be overriding consistent
theme icons from "oxygen-base". I'd rather deal with the directories
approach outlined above.

HS