[Tango-artists] improving overview

[Rodney Dawes]

On Thu, 2009-03-19 at 11:33 +0100, Hendrik Eggers wrote: 
> For intuitive icons in the web applications, we decided to rely on
> tango. But there where some icons missing.
> Please see the post
> <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/tango-artists/2008-July/001852.html>
> on this list for more information and
> <http://tango.freedesktop.org/RRZETangoSet> for a current overview.
> 
> While working with tango we found it hard to find an overview of what
> icons are available and where?

We don't even know what all icons are available and where. We only know
where the ones we made are. Tango is about the style, not the icon
theme, which is but a single implementation of the style. There are
thousands of icons available that follow the Tango style. Some are part
of tango-icon-theme, most are not. There is also gnome-icon-theme which
follows the Tango style, and is under the GPL. Lots of applications also
use Tango styled icons (such as those in Houdini 9).

> The picture at the wiki
> <http://tango.freedesktop.org/Image:Tango-feet.png> gives a good idea
> but it's hard to find a specific icon once you choose it from the
> picture.

That picture is but a pebble upon the ocean. It is an appetizer, not
meant to represent the full set of all possible Tango icons ever drawn.
It would be crazy to have that in a single image.

> What I would like to suggest is enhancing the ArtLibreSet page and
> creating new pages in the format of
> <http://tango.freedesktop.org/RRZETangoSet> where you have a detailed
> overview on the collection. I hope you understand what I mean?!
> 
> Sadly only Art Libre Set is available under
> <http://tango.freedesktop.org/static/cvs/>.
> So I checked out all icons on
> <http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/rrze/tango/>, one of Germany's major
> ftp mirrors which is operated by my employer. I would of course prefer
> having them on the freedesktop server.

I didn't realize that artlibre was still there. I should probably
remove /static/ from the server to avoid any confusion (and to keep
people from attempting to link to it).

> To create the overview pages in the wiki more easily, a colleague of
> mine is currently programming a perl script for creating the wiki code
> for the pages dynamically. This will be published as well as soon as it
> is finished.

We already have a php extension to MediaWiki that generates a gallery
page based on the docbook xml for the icon naming spec. However, we
disabled this page for several reasons. We can't have pages embedding
icons directly from webcvs.freedesktop.org. It puts too much load on the
servers, and the FreeDesktop admins asked me to disable the gallery. So,
the gallery was disabled. Also, a single page with a list of 5000 icons
on it is not especially useful, not least in that it causes Firefox to
waste a lot of memory, takes forever to load, and puts an unnecessarily
large load on the server that is serving the icon files.

> 
> Hopefully, I've now made clear what my intention is: Creating overview
> pages for all sets to ease access and increase overview of what is
> available.

What we really need is an indexed, searchable database of icons. Just
having lots of pages that list static images isn't really helpful. If
that's what you want, then you should probably just pull the icon theme
source, from cvs, git, or a tarball, and open the directory in a file
manager. But also, the goal of tango-icon-theme, nor the Tango project,
is to provide a huge library of icons that can be used arbitrarily. We
want to improve the Linux desktop, not simply enable developers to have
new pretty icons, while still keeping the same old problems in their
UIs. It can be hard to strike the right balance dealing with app
developers, though I think we have been doing a pretty good job.

> And one last information: Yes, RRZETangoIconSet was refused to be
> included in tango repository due to scaling and colour issues.
> Scaling issues are fixed and I am currently hiring a designer for
> adjusting the colours and creating more icons. I would like to make
> clear that we are highly interested in tango and willing to invest in
> the project. I will also instruct the new designer to participate on
> this list.

Those weren't the only reasons. A lot of the icons there dilute the
metaphors we've built in the icons in Tango. They also don't really make
sense for the majority of users for tango-icon-theme. The
tango-icon-theme project is but one of the projects we all work on, and
it only includes some icons. It is not a catch-all repository for any
and all icons in the Tango style. Even if the RRZE icons had all the
colors, scaling, metaphor, or whatever similar issues resolved, I am not
sure that they would make sense in tango-icon-theme.

> So again - sorry for breaking the rules.
> I hope that we get the chance to make a contribution to tango. RfC ...

They aren't rules exactly. They are however, the generally accepted
practice for all open source projects. You need to be an involved member
of the project's community, to be able to get the privileges you've
asked for.