Re: Stock Items Deprecation

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:41 PM, William Jon McCann
<william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As some of you may have noticed we have recently deprecated Stock Items in
> master.
>
> Some details on this change may be found here:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KCVPoYQBqMbDP11tHPpjW6uaEHrvLUmcDPqKAppCY8o/pub
>
> Please let us know what you think.

Besides what Bastian already points out, I have another concern if we
are to consider moving
away from stock items completely.

The document above points to this list of icon names:
   http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html#names

What guarantees do we have that referring to an icon name in the "icon
naming spec" will
actually produce an icon ?

Will GTK+ have a dependency on an installed icon theme which conforms
to the basic spec ?
(can GTK+'s configure script verify that there is a *complete* set of
icons installed and bail
out if it's not the case ?).

When you refer to a stock icon, you know that if you installed GTK+ on
a given system,
the icon will be there, period, if it's not overridden by an icon
theme, there is always a default
icon.

Having constant definitions of available stock items is also a nice
thing to have i.e.
referring to GTK_STOCK_BUMBLEBEE produces a compiler error, refering to
"gtk-stock-bumblebee" will happily compile and leave you wondering if:

  a.) Did I misspell "bumblebee" ?
  b.) Is "bumblebee" really an icon name ?
  c.) Did I use the wrong Icon Theme, which failed to install a
"bumblebee" icon ?
  d.) Was I so ignorant to use an icon name which was only supported by the
       Icon Theme that existed in my GNOME desktop environment ? Should
       I have known better that "bumblebee" would not exist in other
environments,
       like the embedded device I just setup ?

I'm not really against moving away from the stock items, but I think
that it's important
to be able to guarantee which icon names will be provided for *any*
installation of GTK+,
even if this is a small list of guaranteed icons.

Cheers,
    -Tristan

> Thanks,
> Jon
>
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