Re: App-specific icons -- best practice?

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

Hmm, this is getting a bit more urgent now, we've a deadline looming  
and we're still debating in-house whether it makes more sense for the  
application or the theme to install distro-branded, app-specific icons.

Some are saying that it's bad practice for a theme package to install  
files into the namespace of an application package, while others are  
pointing out that apps can't be expected to maintain patches for every  
possible theme. Distros can certainly patch those apps downstream, but  
that will become more of a chore as more apps start installing app- 
specific icons. And independent theme artists don't have that luxury  
at all.

So what should I be definitively telling our maintainers, and why?

Cheeri,
Calum.


On 19 Aug 2008, at 12:20, Calum Benson wrote:

> I'm working on a couple of apps here which, as per <http://live.gnome.org/ThemableAppSpecificIcons 
> >, install their default app-specific hicolor icons into /usr/share/ 
> <appname>/icons/hicolor.  So far so good.
>
> That page also says "You can also provide icons for other themes in  
> here, by installing them into a subdirectory for that theme".  My  
> question is how best to do that, as so far I haven't seen anyone  
> else doing it.  Specifically, we want to add icons for Sun's branded  
> icon theme, Nimbus.
>
> It seems like the correct approach would be to have the Nimbus theme  
> itself install the icons into /usr/share/<appname>/icons/nimbus.   
> However, should the user uninstall the app, that means they're still  
> left with a /usr/share/<appname> directory lying around, which  
> doesn't seem ideal.
>
> The other obvious option would be for the theme to install the icons  
> into /usr/share/icons/<themename>, just as if they were non-app- 
> specific icons.  This gives the cleanest separation between theme  
> and application, but seems to go against the spirit of what's  
> described on the wiki.
>
> The wording on the wiki actually initially gave me the impression  
> that the application itself should install the icons for any  
> additional themes, too-- but that's surely not what's really being  
> suggested?  (Although it would actually be a good way to handle app- 
> specific a11y-themed icons, but probably not much else.)
>
> So, how should we really be doing this?
>
> Cheeri,
> Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems