some breakages due to icons move from hicolor to gnome

[Sebastien Bacher <seb128 debian org>]

Hi,

During that cycle a lot of icons from gnome-icon-theme have been moved
from hicolor to gnome, that has for effect to cause different sort of
breakages, by example:
- it breaks GNOME applications for people using them with a
non-using-GNOME theme
(some time ago an evolution user using xfce was complaining that after
updating most of the icons are broken for him. a kubuntu maintainer has
just been reporting a GNOME application crashing on KDE with crystal
icon theme because gnome-settings-default-applications has been moved to
gnome theme)
- when login to GNOME, if gnome-panel (with some launchers using gnome
icons like web-browser) starts before having gnome-settings-daemon
applying the icon theme you get error dialog about the icons beeing not
found

I've opened http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330061 about that.
The maintainer argue that installing icons to hicolor is wrong. So what
should applications do? Stop using icons from gnome-icon-theme? Accept
to be broken for people running GNOME applications from KDE by example?
That seems to be a compability breakage, quite a lot of applications are
actually using icons which used to be shipped to hicolor and will have
issues now. 

GTK has a xsetting since 2.8.10 (discussed on
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325546) to set an another
fallback before hicolor which can act as a workaround, but since no
other desktop set it at the moment it doesn't change the frustation for
users to have things broken on upgrade

Any opinion on the topic?


Cheers,

Sebastien Bacher