[Tango-artists] Tango in Wine

[Rodney Dawes]

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 14:39 +0100, Joel Holdsworth wrote:
> > I would recommend having wine follow the Icon Theme Specification, and
> > load the icons from the system theme this way, to integrate with the
> > rest of the system.
> 
> The problem is that these icons have to be baked into the dlls at
> compile time as windows resources - that is the way Windows does icons,
> so wine has to as well, otherwise it'll cause incompatibilities.

Not exactly. It means that a request for those resources in those dlls
needs to return an icon. It doesn't necessarily mean that the resource
must actually be compiled in to the dll.

> The reason to choose tango icons is because of their high quality, and
> because they look good on different colour backgrounds for example.
> Also, even though it won't match some themes, the tango style guidelines
> will help the wine look less conspicuously bad on a good proportion of
> target platforms.

Yes, and the Tango style guidelines do not mean that you must use the
icons from tango-icon-theme, and the style guidelines are not CC-By-SA
either. Anyone can create icons under any license that follow the
guidelines. However, the current guidelines on the web site are a slight
bit out of date at this point, with the icons we are actually creating
these days. Also, the SVG icons you linked in your original mail are not
even from tango-icon-theme. They're from gnome-icon-theme which is
GPLv2. I also don't really think the wine glass is a particularly
fitting metaphor for "thing that runs Windows programs" so much as a
logo/mascot for the project. Simply sticking it on top of other icons,
doesn't really explain what's happening to end users who aren't already
somewhat familiar with what wine is. Rather than taking existing icons
that are in the Tango style, and sticking the wine glass on top of them,
it would probably be better to draw somewhat more distinct/branded icons
for the various apps. As for sticking icons in the DLLs, I would
recommend using the icons from the tango-icon-theme git repository, and
using the artwork in the tango-icon-library git repository as building
blocks for others, when you can't load them from the user's theme.

> > This could be done by writing a driver back-end that
> > uses GTK+ or Qt to load the icons, or by writing an icon theme
> > implementation in wine itself. It would also be really sweet if there
> > was a GTK+ display driver in wine that used GTK+ to draw the widgets, so
> > that wine apps looked the same as the rest of my system, but that's a
> > lot more work I think.
> 
> This is a similar problem to above. There is a slow push in wine towards
> getting Windows UXThemes supported, but for the sake of applications
> this will likely have to be provided through windows .theme mechanism.
> People want Gtk and Qt-like Wine themes, but these will likely be
> provided through theme files crafted to look like Qt and Gtk.

Well some apps will just do their own thing anyway. I don't know how you
would create a UXTheme that is cratfed to look like Qt and GTK+, when
there is no set look for either toolkit. The look of the toolkit depends
on what theme the user is using. Having a specially named UXTheme that
causes wine to use some other code to do stuff instead might be better,
and still let one do things.

> All this because of application compatibility!

It really depends on how you define compatibility here. I don't think
either of my suggestions would break compatibility for apps. But if you
define compatibility as 100% exact clone of what it looks like on a
specific version of Windows, then even providing different icons than
what is on Windows, would break it. :)