[Tango-artists] Presentation and suggestions on icon-naming-utils

[Rodney Dawes]

On Sat, 2005-11-19 at 13:52 +0100, Juan Manuel García Molina wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I would like to thank you for the nice work on Tango icons and I would also 
> like to share a pair of thinks with you.
> 
> I use KDE 3.4 and I would like to have a better experience with Tango. Thus, 
> I've been hacking a while on "legacy-icon-mapping.xml" to get working, for 
> example, the mail-attach icon. In order to do it, I added these lines on 
> context dir "actions":
>   <icon name="../status/mail-attachment">
>     <link>attach</link><!-- KDE 3.4 -->
>   </icon>

> And it works (I can see the clip). Before keep on working a bit on this issue 
> and keep on defining links for icons, I would like to know if you consider 
> correct the use of the folder path "../status/".

No. The icon name is a name, not a path. There is a patch floating
around somewhere that will make KDE 3.5 at least, support the new
contexts, though. I don't have a url, or the patch handy, or I would
attach it, but you probably want to get it. The target KDE version
for Tango to work on is really going to be KDE 4. Not everything is
going to be guaranteed to work on older versions, due to the way that
icon themes are handled in the KDE codebase. The name attribute for the
icon tag, and the cdata for the link tags, should all be ONLY the name
of the icons in question. Having to use symlinks is bad enough. Adding
cross-directory symlinks on top of that makes it even more difficult
to manage properly.

Also, I've left the attachment icon link out of CVS for now, as I am
not sure if we should have separate icons for the status of a mail vs.
the action of creating a new attachment to a mail. If so, this means
that KMail, Evolution, and possibly other applications, would need to
be patched to use different icons for the mail status and the toolbar
and menu items for creating a new attachment. I'm currently leaning
toward this solution, but I also want to reduce the number of icons in
general, so that the UI doesn't have too many distractions from the user
with colorful contrasting icons everywhere.

-- dobey