Re: Icons of program

["Sergey I. Panov" <sipan mit edu>]

I've been watching the "Icons" disuccion with a horror! There no
better way of making the whole thing (GNOME) useless then implementing
any of the proposals ( .directory,  .info files for each file or even
SimpleVFS). Finally I hear the voice I'd like to add my to. 

Mark Hulme-Jones wrote:

> With _all_ of the above points taken into account, I formulated the
> following
> 
> Icons (that is the pictures themselves) should be stored in some central
> repository (eg /usr/share/icons ) 
> A user could install their own personal repository of icons if the
> appropriate one was not provided in the system-wide directory (eg
> $HOME/.gnome/icons/) just like with gimp plug-ins in other words.
> A mime-types database should be used to associate filename suffices
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^                                      ^^^^^^^^
  and "magic" types as a backup for suffices scheme.

> with an appropriate program (eg .jpg with ee), this should be
> changeable by the user. This would represent the default action
> associated with double-clicking on a file. It would also set the
> default icon for that type of file.
> ...
> All of this is great for Documents, but does not deal with executables,
> which in most cases the user is only ever going to have shortcuts to
> (since they nearly all reside in non-user-writable directories), so in
> this instance just use the .info files as shortcuts (that is little
> shell scripts which simply run that program. You can embed
> executable-related meta-data in the comments as above.
> ...
> I think the best place for the SimpleVFS idea is for representing the
> desktop, (which may be the intention, I'm not sure) at least this way
> you avoid confusing the user by telling them that the desktop
> (apparently the top level of the filing system) is in fact about three
> levels deep on the C Drive (?, I still wonder how MS came up with that
> one) 

  There should be two collections .info ( what in KDE is *.kdelnk )
files (just as two collections of icons) one e.g. in
/usr/share/(desktop|(gnome|kde))/apps and another e.g in
$HOME/(.desktop|(.gnome|.kde))/apps
Desktop tree then will have links to those .info files, but also panel
menu and wm menu will have oppotunity to use them.

 Sergey