Icon mess

[George Goldberg]

On 14 June 2011 00:08, George Kiagiadakis <kiagiadakis.george at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I started looking at our icons earlier because there were some
> conflicts with oxygen-icons in the debian packages I created, and I
> have found a few things worth mentioning and/or discussing. Brain dump
> follows...

Thanks for doing this. It is really badly needed to sort this mess out.

> I took a look at what icons we have, what icons the CMs request and
> created a table here [1]. After this research, I noticed we are
> shipping some extra icons that are not used (im-bonjour, im-meanwhile)
> and I removed them in a branch [2]. Comments welcome.

Ship It.

> Regarding the icon theme: we must not install anything into the oxygen
> theme. This is just wrong, for two reasons:
>
> 1) Icons will later be provided by the oxygen theme as well, so we
> have conflicting files (as in the case of my packages).
> 2) The users may choose not to use oxygen as their icon theme, in
> which case they will have no icons in tp-kde applications.

Agreed.

> The right place to install application icons is either in
> ${DATA_INSTALL_DIR}/<appname>/icons or in the hicolor icon theme
> (reference [3]). Since we are using them from many applications and
> not just one, the correct approach in this case is to put them in
> hicolor. So, I took the first step and changed the "kde-telepathy"
> icon to be in the hicolor icon theme in my branch [2]. The same should
> be done for the rest of the icons, but I am wondering whether we
> should prefer copying oxygen icons or kopete icons in this theme.

Agreed, but likewise, I'm not sure whether we should use oxygen or
kopete icons in hicolor. Perhaps we should ask the artists?

> Regarding the "kde-telepathy" icon, the name is pretty bad. Dashes in
> icons create a sort of group, which behaves like that: If the icon
> requested exists, it is used, otherwise, the last part after the last
> dash is dropped and the rest is used as an icon name, and this is done
> recursively. So, if I request an icon "im-foo-bar-baz", KIcon will
> first try this name, but if it doesn't exist, it will then try
> "im-foo-bar" and then "im-foo" and finally "im", until it finds one
> that exists. If none exists, it falls back to the questionmark icon.
> In the case of "kde-telepathy", if the icon doesn't exist, it falls
> back to "kde", which obviously exists, and it's not really good for
> our purposes. I would prefer it to be "telepathy-kde", which would
> fall back to "telepathy", which is way better (it doesn't really
> exist, but if it existed, it would be a better choice than "kde").

Agreed.


--
George