Re: GNOME Icon Theme 2.13.5[.1] AKA the HOLY CRAP, ICONS! release

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 20:37 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hi Rodney,
> 
> Le mardi 17 janvier 2006 �2:59 -0500, Rodney Dawes a �it :
> > That's right. Only Kenya [1] has lions, and only GNOME has over 1200
> > uniquely named icons, in its default theme. In an effort to improve
> > the maintainability of gnome-icon-theme, I've spent most of this past
> > weekend preparing it to migrate GNOME to the Icon Naming Specification,
> > make the default theme be much more generic, and help clean up the UI
> > a bit, by helping to get rid of extraneous icons.
> 
> Will there be an easy way to update all our modules so they use the new
> icon names? If we migrate right now, I'm pretty sure some modules won't
> find some icons because they were renamed.

I'm going to try and get a gallery status page up on gnome.org
somewhere, like we have for the tango theme, soon, which will help
show which icons are done in the theme, and what names are in the
spec. However, there's no easy way to just fix all the code to change
the icons that are being looked up. The latest versions of GTK+ and
libgnomeui look up icons for MIME types through the naming spec style
first, and then fall back to the old gnome style. Also, the
icon-naming-utils script creates a large number of symlinks at install
time, to preserve backward compatibility. So, despite the fact that
the actual icon files have changed names to comply with the spec, the
apps should all still work, and will make the transition much more
smooth.

I plan to patch gnome-applets soon though, so that it uses the new
names in gweather. Also, one of the ideas as I stated in the
annoucement, is to help reduce the overall number of icons used in
the desktop. So, some icons currently in use, may be better off, were we
to get rid of them. But this is part of the work in getting the spec up
to par with what is really needed, and migrating the desktop over. In
the end, I think all this work is going to be very profitable [1] for
us, as a free software project and community.

-- dobey

[1] profitable in the communist sense, without monetary exchange