Re: GEP 7 - icons and thumbnails - gnome_icon_loader

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 26 Sep 2002, Michael Meeks wrote:

> > Hmmm. That depends on how many icons use the DisplayName property. There 
> > certainly won't be many users of attachpoints and text embeding.
> 
> 	Quite; which made me wonder about a lot of things. Particularly what
> the Display name is for, and why we want it. I can understand it's use
> perhaps in an icon selector, but then really lots of icons would want to
> have names, which means a lot of extra files on disk, and stuff in
> memory.

I'm not saying all icons need names, but I was gonna use DisplayName when 
re-implementing the emblem browser for instance (its a bit busted right 
now, since the emblems are read from the icon theme now). The current 
browser uses some hacky xml files to translate the built in emblems 
and nothing for use-added emblems.
 
> > > 	+ Unsure what theme->display_name, theme->comment are for, is it
> > > 	  exposed, looks like they are read, stored, destroyed without
> > >           use ? similarly, what is the GnomeIconData->display_name for ?
> > > 	  and if neither of these are that useful - do we need the
> > > 	  localization burden of "Yet another file to localise" :-) at
> > > 	  least with XML files we have existing tools. So ... in 
> > > 	  summary:
> > 
> > They are not used in the current code, but a icon theme chooser applet 
> > would use them.
> 
> 	I'm really unclear about this; having spent a fair while optimising the
> gnome-vfs mime parser; it seems a lot of time is spent parsing i18n
> stuff which is all jammed into 1 file.
> 
> 	Similarly in oaf, a load of time / space was wasted whacking great
> chunks of i18n data around the place before we fixed it.
> 
> 	I'm slightly concerned that we add this localized field, [ and the
> localization capability ] to the files without any real need for it.
> Particularly theme selectors will not be built into GnomeIconLoader -
> and will almost certainly use a meta-theme bundle, making these mostly a
> waste of space.

For GnomeIconLoader they are indeed not very useful, but we're talking on 
the order of two strings per app here. It can hardly be called bloat.
 
> 	Clearly - if we're aiming for global i18n coverage, we're looking at
> upwards of 250 lines per DisplayName ;-) unlikely, but ...
> gnome-vfs.keys has ~30 or so translations per key. It just seems a
> non-ideal way for packaging, distribution and scalability to specify
> things like this - especially when there is no pressing need for i18n
> here I think.

The DisplayName field was added (to the spec) because it was deemed very 
useful, especially for KDE. For some icons (like emblems) it makes sense.
 
> > gnome-icon-theme in gnome cvs.
> 
> 	Took a poke at that, interesting - didn't improve my nautilus icon
> situation but ... ;-)

Situation?

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a suave small-town grifter from the Mississippi delta. She's an enchanted 
goth stripper with an MBA from Harvard. They fight crime!