Re: Removal of icons in buttons/menus

[Olivier Brunel <jjk jjacky com>]

On 10/09/13 22:43, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 4:38 PM, Olivier Brunel <jjk jjacky com> wrote:
>
> > That's why I think the options should be brought back, so that for all
> > users that used & relied on icons, nothing is broken (or they can fix it
> > via options in their Xsettings manager/settings.ini).
> >
> > They should also be marked deprecated so it is known they shouldn't be
> > used/relied upon anymore. De-connecting them from Xsettings should only
> > happen eventually, not now.
> No, the Xsetting is not coming back.

Alright; And I do understand the decision to remove options that, as you
said explained before, made "it impossible for designers or even
developers to know if there will be an icon at any place in the UI or
not", since it allowed users to not show icons on buttons/menus where
there should have been some.

I do not understand, however, why the entire GtkImageMenuItem widget was
deprecated, and not just what relates to those options - since using
icons in menus remain a very useful thing, and one used by many GTK apps
out there. It makes better UI/user experience as it allows to accomplish
certain tasks much easier/faster.

The commit message mentions using a GIO API, but that's certainly not a
"valid" replacement, since this is a completely different API and
doesn't get us an actual widget/menuitem we can use in a menu.
It looks like now every dev/app needs to re-implement this widget itself!?


Moreover, what's the justification for not only deprecated the while
widget, but breaking it - and therefore any & all GTK apps using it - at
the same time?

This is a widget that is only used when an icon should be present, since
that's the whole purpose of the widget. With GTK 3.10 this behavior, the
default/expected behavior since - again - that's the very reason to use
this widget, is now broken.

I understand that years ago GNOME decided to enforce the user option to
break apps UI by turning icons off by default, but that's certainly not
a reason to break GTK as a result today.
If you wish for GNOME apps to not show icons in menus, and they use some
GtkImageMenuItem-s, then those apps needs to be fixed/patched. Breaking
GTK, and every app using it (from GNOME and not), isn't the (right) way
to do it.

I hope you can agree, and that the situation will be addressed in a
future release.

-j