Re: Icon Metadata for Filesystems

[Rodney Dawes <dobey gnome org>]

On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 15:27 -0400, A. Walton wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Rodney Dawes <dobey gnome org> wrote:
> > Holas,
> >
> > I have written the attached patch to GIO, which implements getting an
> > icon name for a mounted volume from an .iconrc file within its file
> > system. David Z suggested that it might be useful to also allow other
> > information to be provided here, such as the volume name to use in the
> > display. I'd like to get some definite agreement on the file name to use
> > here (davdiz suggested possibly using .xdg-volume-info), and get the
> > patch upstream. I implemented this in GIO, as it appears the HAL is not
> > aware of all possible mounts (particularly user owned fuse mounts), and
> > this should work for all volumes. Particularly, some fuse mounts may
> > want to provide this metadata file virtually, to specify their icon.
> >
> > What do you think about the file name, and the patch in general?
> 
> The idea in general I'm very fond of: it's the KISS solution to "Help
> me rename my volume". Changing the icon is a definite added bonus
> (though what happens if the icon doesn't exist on the source machine?

It looks like Nautilus displays the really old school, ugly, curled
paper sheet icon, if no icon at all exists in the theme, the panel
displays no icon for the "Place," and GtkFileChooser shows the hard disk
icon. This is with gtk+ 2.12.9, gnome-panel 2.22.2 and nautilus 2.23.90,
and a memory stick with the .iconrc on it. And I'm using glib 2.17.7 and
gvfs 0.2.5 with my patches.

If the file specifies "media-flash-sd" and the theme only has
"media-flash", then "media-flash" gets used. This also seems to be
the case if "media-flash-sd" does exist in hicolor, but not in the
currently selected theme.

> Should we load an icon from the disk? ".volume-icon" for even more
> magical hidden files? Specify it in the .volume-info file? ergh, too
> much thinking). I suggested this solution (for volume names) in an
> Ubuntu bug a few months ago, but I haven't had time to do much of
> anything recently. The name I'm less fond of, but I don't think it
> exactly matters what we go with there. ".volume-info" would be enough
> for me, but anything works.

I think we should just fall back to the appropriate generic media icon
for the type of media. My primary goal with this patch was to enable
custom fuse mounts for remote storage to specify better icons than just
the generic hard disk, to allow themeable branding.

-- Rodney