Re: Removal of icons in buttons/menus

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi,

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013, at 10:45, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> You are right that the functionality of the gtk-button-images and
> gtk-menu-images settings was removed. They are only 'deprecated' insofar
> as
> programs that were using g_object_set to directly change these settings
> on
> the GtkSettings object will not fail to compile or run.

In-so-far as it is possible to use g_object_set() to change these
settings manually, we still need to have code in the widgets themselves
to support programs that do this.  That means that we really have gained
no advantage in terms of reduced complexity anywhere.

However, from looking at the commits in question:

menus:

  https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?id=e8147d15f74e62047c84eb95e393449722198d89

buttons:

  https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?id=65c31629c38b3b1f49fb6f3327dc28819ffe0657


it seems that this is not the case.  Those commits remove code from
GtkButton and GtkImageMenuItem to talk to the GtkSettings object,
requiring you to use the "always-use-image" property on the GtkButton
and the "always-show-image" property on the GtkMenuItem.

In a way I'm conflicted about this.  The simplifications to these
widgets (although not substantial) have at least provided an actual
reason for us to have removed this feature.  It would have been utterly
ridiculous and useless for us to have removed the binding glue for these
options between XSETTINGS and GtkSettings if we still had the
GtkSettings-specific behaviour in the widgets themselves (which is not
the case).

On the other hand, this really sucks if you're an app author and you
just want your images back.  If I read the code correctly then you
cannot merely set the option on GtkSettings as you just suggested -- you
have to set a property on every single affected widget.

In any case, I'm not sure what the harm was of having this setting.  I
can appreciate that this stuff will all die when we have Wayland (and
I'm happy for that) but removing this now (for a gain of -98 and -86
lines respectively to gtkimagemenuitem.c and gtkbutton.c) seems highly
destructive for very little reduction in complexity.

> As far as the functionality of those settings goes, we (the involved GTK+
> developers) have decided that we don't want to support this
> functionality,
> which makes it impossible for designers or even developers to know if
> there
> will be an icon at any place in the UI or not. This kind of variability
> makes it much hard to design and develop user interfaces.

For what it's worth, I agree that removing these icons in GNOME apps is
a good idea, but I don't think the argument about predictability for
designers and developers is a particularly good one.  There's two
reasons for that.

The first is that, as far as GNOME goes, we do not expose a setting
anywhere in our user interface for toggling this feature.  If someone
wants to mess around with XSETTINGS overrides or do something with the
tweak tool, that's their business, and if they make their desktop ugly
in doing so, then they get to own that.

The second is that if an application author really really required no
icons in their menus or buttons, even to the extent that they felt that
they needed to override the user's settings, they could be the ones that
manually override this at the GtkSettings level, forcing its value to
FALSE.


People keep raising this issue (both on list and on IRC) and I think
there's a good reason for it.

Cheers