Re: icon naming spec and gnome-vfs

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 18:31 +0200, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> I perfectly see the advantage of having a set of unique device icons for
> different flash cards. It's undoubtedly easier to use if my desktop is
> populated by distinguishable device icons. But in my view it's much
> worse to have, say Bluecurve styled generic drive icon and 9 other
> specific media icons that are of totally different graphical style than
> to have 10 generic media drive icons.

(fwiw, Fedora's Bluecurve got full coverage of the current icons that
gnome-vfs uses, probably why I haven't spotted this bug earlier)

> I always intended to draw the specific media icons, but I really hope to
> see infrastructure for getting the generic fallback in place first so
> that theming is actually a solution and not an excuse. In the past I've
> been adding specific icons to gnome icon theme, while not being able to
> make them properly in all the required sizes, only to see distributions
> fail to theme the set properly. The concept of themes makes us look
> unpolished without a decent concept of generic fallback. So let's go
> from generic to specific -- properly providing all sizes, ending up in a
> consistently looking desktop sooner. 

Right, so, I don't think anyone disagrees with you here. And the icon
naming spec with it's clever fallback schemes is a big part in getting
this right.

So, I think that the point of contention here is simply that Rodney
decided to switch gnome-icon-theme completely to the icon-naming-spec
before it was ready. And I think we can agree that the naming spec is
not ready for GNOME since it doesn't meet the needs of gnome-vfs, yes?

And, hey, I just wanted to help sort out this mess and I even wrote a
patch but was told "this isn't about gnome-vfs" and "we need buyin from
other desktops". That's fine if you have that point of view - but then,
please, don't make GNOME use stuff that is not baked especially if you
start rejecting good patches that fixes it.

So I think the solution here in the interim (e.g. for 2.16) is to make
gnome-icon-theme provide icons, not symlinks, of the stuff that was
deleted. For example gnome-removable-media-cf and friends. I've raised
this suggestion elsewhere to Rodney but he has not responded yet. I'm
not on the release team but if I was this issue would be a blocker for
our next release.

Thanks,
David