The future of HiColor

[Henrique Pinto]

Em Sáb 18 Jun 2005 23:33, James Richard Tyrer escreveu:
> For the application icons, the old HiColor icons (which were moved to
> KDE Classic) should be moved back to HiColor.

If I understood you correctly, this means either:

 * Users would need to install kdeartwork to get hicolor support;
 * All kdeclassic icons would need to be re-added to the KDE packages
   they were in before the theme switch, making the packages even bigger
   than they are now (except kdeartwork, of course)

I don't think the first option would solve the problem. And I _really_ don't 
like the second option. I see no reason to distribute two complete icon 
themes with all KDE packages.

> Where HiColor icons were installed as "crystalsvg" this should be
> corrected.

Agreed. Crystal equivalents of them should be made, and they should be moved 
to kdeartwork or wherever KDEClassic/HiColor icons end up being.

> I would not install any Crystal style icons as: "hicolor".  I don't know
> how many apps don't have either a KDEClassic icons or an old HiColor
> icon that has gone missing (probably still somewhere in SVN).  I would
> expect that it wouldn't be very many.  We will need to make new HiColor
> icons for these.

In theory, I agree with you. However, your proposal would mean making most KDE 
packages bigger, by containing two different version of every icon (hicolor 
and crystalsvg).

I agree with you that crystalsvg icons don't fit the "hicolor" definition. But 
installing crystalsvg icons as hicolor would solve the interoperability 
problem with other desktops without hassle for KDE users. (I mean, this would 
solve the interoperability problem if users prefer any icon over no icon at 
all.)

I think the whole "hicolor" idea is not very good. Perhaps a better way of 
solving the problem would be having generic icons and specify fallback 
generic icons in apps' .desktop files, i.e., Kate, for example, would have 
"kate" as it icon and "text-editor" as generic icon. If no "kate" icon exists 
in the currently used theme, then the generic "text-editor" icon is used. If 
a list of generic icons is agreed upon and major desktops' default icon 
themes implement all of them, I think this can work very well.

-- 
 Henrique Pinto
 henrique.pinto at kdemail.net