[Tango-artists] patch to fix icon-naming-utils KDE mapping dirs problem

[Niko Mirthes]

On Wednesday 25 January 2006 9:52 pm, Vaclav Slavik wrote:
> Not only are these patches a little too Tango specific to be likely to
> get into the upstream, IMHO (and you don't seriously expect people
> other then Gentoo users to recompile kdelibs just to try out Tango,
> do you?), they don't completely fix this -- icons that are actions
> for KDE won't show in Actions part of icons selector dialog as far as
> I can tell.

I'm the author of the patches Rodney linked at kde-look.org, as well the 
author of many small patches adding the links to most of KDE's icons. I'm 
also an avid KDE user. The context patches are not Tango specific, but are 
specific to the proposed Icon Naming Specification found at 
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards. I have sent a mail to the 
kde-core-devel list requesting comments about handling icon contexts, however 
it remains in moderation limbo for reasons unknown to me.

Currently, KDE handles (and hard-codes and validates) five icon contexts. They 
are Actions, Applications, Devices, Filesystems, and Mimetypes. The proposed 
icon naming spec adds seven icon contexts to date; Animations, Categories, 
Emblems, Emotes, International, Places, and Status, as can be seen by reading 
my patches. The Actions context has been used by KDE for quite some time, so 
obviously any icons placed there will be available to KDE without the the 
need for patching. To my knowledge, with the patches applied, all added icon 
contexts and icons do indeed show up in the UI.

It's worth noting that these patches probably break binary compatibility on 
KDE 3.x.x, and are at best a hack. I have no programming experience, so 
finding a superior method is outside of my skill set. Ultimately, these or 
any other patches would never make it into a KDE 3.x.x release anyway. Any 
hope of accommodating these new icon contexts would have to take place in 
current KDE trunk (KDE 4).

Also, the Oxygen icons team ( http://www.oxygen-icons.org/ ) have expressed 
interest in the icon naming spec, and will hopefully make use of it.

Please consider taking a look at the spec and sending a mail to the xdg 
mailing list expressing any concerns or feedback you may have. We'll never 
get anywhere without reasonable consideration in a neutral forum.

Take care,
        Niko Mirthes