Re: App-specific icons -- best practice?

[Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se>]

Hi Calum!

Installing the icons with the same name in your theme is probably going 
to give the least headache to your designer and your developers. (ie. 
usr/share/icons/nimbus). That way the application will pick it up just 
as normal. I mean, it's just branding anyway.

On the other hand, if a ISV develops a application, hires a freelance 
artist to draw some icons for them and decides to do icons both for 
regular GNOME and for OpenSolaris (and maybe if they have unlimited 
amount of cash and feel bored, they can pay the artist to draw 12 
different styles for every other distro out there + the My Little Pony 
theme on gnome-look.org) they can make use of the app specific theming 
and put things both in /usr/share/appname/icons/hicolor/... and 
/usr/share/appname/icons/nimbus/...

- Andreas


Calum Benson wrote:
> 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.