[Kde-hardware-devel] [kde-artists] Renaming Oxygen's devices/ icons

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Monday, 25. June 2007, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> The question is: what is a device?
>
> This has been a conceptual problem with KDE3 and we need to fix this.

Short summary:
What you state is right, only that it's already fixed or at least it's already 
planned to be fixed in the very near future.

> I submit that devices are *drives* not the disks that are in them.  This
> wasn't really an issue with floppies -- we proceed on the presumption
> that you can only put one thing in them, but it is an issue with CDs &
> DVDs.

2 points:
* Yes, it's a good thing to distinguish between drives and media.
* Media are also devices, just as much as drives are.

> We need icons to use for empty CD & DVD drives.  The drives still exist
> when they don't have a driver in them.

That's right. And this is exactly the reason that both the naming spec and 
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxygen/namingSpec/devices demand
an icon named "drive-optical".

As the Oxygen artists team is dedicated to provide a full implementation of 
the icon naming specification, and at least for the devices category there's 
a decent, up-to-date todo list available (I just mentioned the URL above), 
you bet there will be an icon for optical *drives*, in addition to the icons 
for optical media that already exist.

> That is, an empty CD drive can not be an audio CD or CD-ROM.  That
> distinction can only be made when when a disk is in the drive.
>
> It gets more complicated.  A CD writer can also have a blank disk in it
> which is neither until it has been recorded.
>
> There are a lot of CD formats including video and photo so we might want
> to make a distinction with these also.

You may be surprised (or maybe not) that there are icons already that cover 
plain ROM discs (media-optical), audio discs (media-optical-audio), video 
discs (media-optical-video) and blank discs (media-optical-recordable).

I don't really see Photo CDs (the dedicated format) around anywhere, any discs 
containing photos are just regular ROMs nowadays. I don't see good reasons to 
provide icons for already dead disc formats, but if there ever is a need for 
a media-optical-photo icon, it's straightforward to add one.

> Then we have combination drives which may or may not be writers.

I miss out on the use case for who would need different icons for those, 
especially given that there's virtually only combo drives nowadays.
So, yes, there's different types of drives, but why do we need to provide 
different icons for those?

> OTOH, if you want to update the attached file, I will use those rules
> for renaming icons for now.

No need to update the file, all its contents have been migrated to 
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Oxygen/namingSpec/devices .
That page tracks the current state of the Oxygen icons (and for devices, 
renaming is already done). The suggestions for renaming icons are still in 
the history of the wiki page, maybe they should be kept more visible as 
reference documentation for other icon theme creators.

That's not such a big deal, of course, it can be done in no time.