Re: Patch to fix #321819

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 10:36 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:

> > I don't see why we have to change the nautilus lookup code just because
> > some icon themese are broken.
> 
> And I don't see why we have to make the icon themes be broken, just
> because the nautilus implementation is. Making this argument is
> pointless. All it does is point out that we disagree on what's broken.
> We can sit here and say this over and over and nothing will change.
> 
> >  They will continue to be broken after we
> > change it. Isn't it better to fix these themese instead (and perhaps
> > write some docs for how it works). For all the time that nautilus has
> > supported themed emblems they have worked the same way, emblems for
> > icons of a particular size go into a directory with the same base size
> > as the icon. We also handle resizing fine all over the nautilus code by
> > resizing an icon based on the base size of the icon directory, not the
> > actual size of the icon.
> 
> I would be happy to fix the themes. But fixing the themes to be the way
> you are implying they should be, is not fixing them. It's a workaround
> to deal with the broken logic in nautilus. Because nautilus has always
> worked this way, doesn't mean it wasn't always broken. And nautilus in
> fact doesn't handle resizing fine, because it means I can't draw emblems
> to the size specified for the directory, and have them work properly.

I totally disagree with this, as you stated above.

> > Not only is this how things currently work. I also think its a much
> > better way whan just picking an abitrary size for the emblems (like 50%
> > of the icon size in your patch). It means the various emblems can differ
> > in sizes as needed for a specific icon size.
> 
> The size isn't arbitrary. If you have four emblems on an icon, the most
> appropriate size for those emblems is obviously 1/4 the area of the
> icon, which is icon_size / 2. The various emblems can differ in size
> already. Changing the size to size / 2 isn't going to change that fact.

You think this is obvious, but people clearly disagree with you, since
most emblems for 48x48 icons are 32x32 (although some are smaller).

> > Still, its kind of late to do a change that requires all icon themes to
> > change unless they want to look quite broken.
> 
> All of the icon themes providing emblems at consistent sizes won't look
> broken. The icons might look slightly smaller. But looking broken is a
> very subjective measuremnt to try and state. The emblems implementation
> itself is very arbitrary in nature to begin with. The code simply lists
> every icon in the emblems context, and there is no guarantee that
> another theme will have the same icon, and gnome-icon-theme certainly
> doesn't, and isn't going to, provide all possible icons that all other
> themes might stick in emblems. This patch, along with specifying a set
> of emblems via the icon naming spec, and documentation of how an emblem
> implementation should work, will greatly improve the situation here.
> Fixing the few icon themes that do exist, to fall in line with these
> changes, is hardly an issue.

I'm not sure standardizing emblems in a freedesktop spec is a great
idea. Its at the moment a Gnome only feature, and there are various
ideas for what emblems are used for and how they could be used and/or
extended. There hasn't really been any decisions on this yet, but if we
write something down in a common standard that is gonna lock us down in
the future for sure.

However, documenting somewhere how emblems work in Gnome sounds like a
good idea. Its just clear that we disagree on how icon lookup for
emblems should work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a lounge-singing Amish vagrant on the run. She's a cynical communist 
college professor with an incredible destiny. They fight crime!