[AppStream] Including High Contrast icons in AppStream metadata

[Matthias Klumpp]

2016-02-23 13:28 GMT+01:00 Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746283 details a
> high-contrast partially sighted user seeing hi-color application icons
> which don't match what he sees in the shell when the application is
> installed.

That's a valid request, I think, and likely something we should
support, although there are only very few tools shipping low-contrast
icons...

> The proposal is that we ship the high-contrast application
> icons in the distro/bundle icon tarball and reference them in the XML.
> We can easily namespace them in the icon tarball but we'd need some
> way of tagging them in the XML. Something like <icon
> variant="symbolic"/> or something like that. Perhaps we should just
> stat the icon name "-symbolic" as well when loading under HC, although
> this seems a bit magic.

Urgh, no... I don't think we should touch the XML at all for this.
It's already way too verbose.
The AppStream icon cache is supposed to follow the XDG icon theme
spec, which in fact it doesn't do. Maybe we should finally make it
compliant.
I also have a bug report that we actually assume that the 128x128
icons are HiDPI icons, while that is actually not always true, and we
should use the (admittedly, weird) scaling factor spec for that.

So, right now, the icons are located in $APPSTREAM_DIR/icons/<origin>/<size>
We should likely make this
$APPSTREAM_DIR/icons/<origin>/(hicolor|locolor)/<size> , with size
being "64x64" or "128x128".
If we go for the scaling factor stuff too, 128x128 would vanish as an
icon size, and the size string for those would be "64x64 at 2".
I am not sure about the latter, but the former solution is sane.

Caching icon data which is already available on-disk in the XML is
something I don't want to do, since the XML is not a data cache but
basic info about the software components available in software
sources.

Cheers,
    Matthias

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