Re: some breakages due to icons move from hicolor to gnome

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 17:39 +0100, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> 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

There is an XSetting that we can set from gtkrc and is set by
gnome-settings-daemon for this. We should be setting it
in /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc.

> (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)

Applications should never crash on missing icons from the theme. If
there are crashes, please file bugs with backtraces so they can be
fixed properly.

> - 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

This panel issue is a race condition on log-in. Similar issues have been
occuring with the performance improvements, where various applets
"appear" to be missing to the panel, and it pops up the error dialog, or
gnome-settings-daemon tries to get run twice, and such. I think we
should just fix this race, so that things don't get loaded until
gnome-settings-daemon is up and happy. Then we can just make it load and
set the XSettings as fast as possible.

> 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?

As stated here and my last comment on the g-i-t bug, we should install
an /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc with the following line:

gtk-fallback-icon-theme = "gnome"


-- dobey