Re: Application specific HC icons how?

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 15:23 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 14:11 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:

> > IIRC, the only major objection was that during the transition, newer
> > versions of gnome-themes wouldn't contain the HC icons for older
> > versions of an application (i.e. before the application had begun
> > installing them itself), so we'd have to figure out how to handle those
> > kinds of dependencies.
> 
> IMO it's no different than when that application uses new API in a newer
> version of a library. For instance, applications requiring GTK+ 2.10
> aren't going to run on GTK+ 2.8. If people are going to upgrade the
> core theme for the desktop, they should upgrade the rest of the desktop
> as well, generally. Otherwise, yeah, there could be breakage.

Yeah, I think it's more of a management-expectation problem, really--
applications shouldn't depend on themes, so users have come to expect
themes to be independent entities, upgradable at any time with no
noticeable ill-effects.  Which, indeed, they would be again, after the
transition was complete.

So the question is, how would people take to having to upgrade a bunch
of applications every time they updated gnome-themes?  Would probably be
acceptable if we could complete the transition within one dev cycle, I
guess-- it would certainly be cool to get it done during 2.19 (although
I've no idea how that would impact/align with KDE).

There's also the question of what happens if two applications want to
install HC icons with the same name (which may or may not look the
same).  I guess we already have that problem with the hicolor theme,
though, and it probably just needs a 'best practice' guideline, if there
isn't one already.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems