Re: icon naming spec and gnome-vfs

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

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 many
> places. 
>
>   

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