Jakub Steiner wrote:
On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 02:19 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:If making things work is hard on developers (and by developers, I mean everybody who makes our software kick ass, including artists), then by all means we should look at how to make developers' jobs easier. After all, removing barriers helps us make better software. But doing so by cutting features doesn't help us make *better* software. It just helps us make less-useful software more easily. Sorry if this came off rantish or unappreciative.Focusing on having an icon for every single mime type in the world is not a feature. It leads to numerous problems. We tried to 'keep up' with these needs in the past, and contrary to what some people think here, we failed. We managed to make the icon theme unthemable, failed to provide all the necessary sizes so the icons looked like a fuzzy blob in manyplaces.
This doesn't change the fact that you are unilaterally removing a feature that many people find useful to get their work done: I find very valuable being able to distinguish at a glance different kind of files in a project (c, python and Makefiles for instance). Other people voiced similar concerns in their field of competence (different kind of graphics formats, different audio formats etc)
I love the classy look of our desktop, but if I have to chose between 'fuzzy blob that helps me getting work done' and 'consistent look, which however slows me down', I choose the former.
Also, end-users are not the only consumers of the icons, the icon theme is a component of our stack as any other library and application developers are faced with things changing under their feets: for instance gedit shows a icon of the file, but now this icon is always the same making our work useless and our users unhappy, see for instance https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/30704
ciao Paolo