Re: breakage caused by removed icons from gnome-icon-theme

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 15:04 +0100, Christian Persch wrote:
> Hi,
> Le samedi 04 février 2006 à 23:14 -0500, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
> > On 2/4/06, Christian Persch <chpe gnome org> wrote:
> > > The latest gnome-icon-theme release has removed the "gnome-spinner" and
> > > "gnome-spinner-rest" themed icons, causing breakage in (at least)
> > > epiphany, nautilus, gedit and beagle. Other people have told me that
> > > other removed icons also cause problems in nautilus and deskbar-applet.
> > > This removal needs to be reverted.
> > 
> > Do you have a list of those other removed icons ?
> 
> I downloaded the 2.12.1 and 2.13.6 tarballs from ftp (you can see from
> the size differences alone that it's a huge removal, 2.12.1's .bz2 is
> 3MB, and 2.13.6 only 2MB!), installed in different prefixes, and did a
> bit of find + diff magic, and the result seems to be that 187 icons
> names that are in 2.12.1 are not in the 2.13.6 install either as regular
> file or symlink (list attached).

But this list does not show which icons are in active use. It simply
shows a list of files that were removed. I guarantee that there are a
lot more than 187 icons in gnome-icon-theme that aren't even being used.

> > > The new g-i-t has already been discussed here,
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-January/msg00302html, but insufficient emphasis seems to have been made about backward compatibility. While participants have asked about how to upgrade their apps, we should instead ask what happens when the user upgrades g-i-t, but does not simultaneously upgrade all his apps (apps which may not be maintained anymore, even!).
> > >
> > > Arguably the icon names provided by gnome desktop's gnome-icon-theme are
> > > part of some sort of ABI; should they therefore part of our ABI
> > > stability guarantee?
> > 
> > Yes, at least we should avoid shooting our own foot by removing icon names that
> > are in active use by gnome applications. Time to revert to
> > gnome-icon-theme 2.12 ?
> 
> IMO yes.

Someone should file some bugs then. Just complaining that /some/
icons /may/ be missing isn't going to get it fixed. And, fwiw, the
ABI stability guarantee doesn't seem to apply to the desktop, but
only the developer platform. And gnome-icon-theme is part of the
desktop, not the developer platform. Also, gnome-icon-theme was
never guaranteed to be in the fallback icon path. It has only ever
been the /default/ icon theme, in very informal informal and ugly
ways. But I've also improved that for 2.14, and while the settings
daemon is running, with gtk+ 2.8.10 or later, the "gnome" theme will
always be searched for icons, before hicolor.

If someone can actually provide a list of what all icons are actively
in use for real, I would love to see it.

-- dobey