Plan to fix icons [was: Re: breakage caused by removed icons from gnome-icon-theme]

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 13:09 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:

> > 1. Can we get this mess fixed (either by fixing apps, or by providing
> > fallbacks/symlinks/whatever) before the 2.14 release?
> 
> I see no problems with getting things patched to use new icons, and
> adding symlinks/fallbacks where appropriate by 2.14. I don't know if
> Alex's work for the MIME fallback stuff will be available by 2.14, but
> we can work assuming that it won't be, and still solve the issues.

In order to fix 2.14 as quickly as possible, can you please do this:

1. Get all the icon names from the old gnome-icon-theme.

2. Create a very visible icon to stand for "I don't have this icon yet".
A big yellow circle is appropriate :)

3. Symlink all the old icon names to point to this very visible icon.

4. Install the new gnome-icon-theme.

5. Run apps, and take notes of where you see the placeholder icon.

6. Create a subpackage of symlinks from the missing icons (the old icon
names) to the new icons.  If you don't have a new icon that matches,
find the closest generic one, or simply put in the old icon image with a
marker to indicate that it needs to be replaced.  See this nice
technique:  http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/01/10/511202.aspx

... It would also be possible to add a GTK_DEBUG=missing-icons flag to
GTK+ that would make it return a big yellow circle instead of NULL when
you request a missing icon.  This would actually be very nice to have.

>  The timeframe for 2.16 freeze, I think and hope, would let us
> work out all of these smaller issues, and make the whole icon theme
> thing really kick ass in our desktop.

Yup.  Let's make a plan right after 2.14 comes out to make this right.
In the meantime, let's fix the situation in 2.14 so that existing apps
don't get missing icons.

[Sidebar:  one thing that gives me a lot of trouble is how to know which
icon name refers to a little thingy I'm seeing on the screen.  If you
get around to implementing GTK_DEBUG=icons or something, it would be
nice if a GtkImage which holds a stock icon would show a tooltip with
the icon name...]

  Federico