Mime Icons and weak aliases (was Re: Theme meme)

[Thomas Leonard]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 10:09:38AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 06:16, Thomas Leonard wrote:
[...]
> > Is ~/.icons replacing ~/.themes, or the other way round? Will ~/.icons
> > contain GTK themes in the future?
> 
> The reason that /usr/share/icons/ThemeName is not
> /usr/share/themes/ThemeName/icons is basically legacy. KDE was already
> using /usr/share/icons/ThemeName, and it didn't seem worth changing.
> (Not everybody agrees with this, but I suspect a change is unlikely
> at this point.)
> 
> Certainly ~/.icons will *not* replace ~/.themes for GTK+ themes.

This seems a bit problematic for 'metathemes', then, if there's no plan
to migrate everything one way or the other. Given that the MIME stuff
doesn't have any legacy issues to worry about, I'm just trying to decide
which system is preferred for new themes. Perhaps the icon spec could
mention something about this?

Also, there needs to be a way to specify what the current theme actually
is (we should allow for using one theme for application icons and another
for MIME types, but whatever themes are chosen, they should apply to all
programs regardless of desktop).

> (Though we unfortunately still have major incompatibility in the icon
> theme spec between desktops because you can't find KDE icons without
> knowing the magic KDE default icon theme name, currently crystalsvg.
> But anyways...)
>
> > Also, is the icon theme spec going to use the base dir spec?
> 
> I'd assume so.

Won't this also cause incompatibilities (at least as far as ~/.icons is
concerned... ~/.local/share/icons)?

It seems there are a lot of compatibility issues here. Not that ~/.themes
is any better in this regard.

[...]
> The leading mime prefix seems sort of nice to me, but the use of _ to
> replace / isn't going to work since according to to RFC 2045, media
> types like x-stuff_stuff/x-more_stuff are legal.

OK, : sounds good to me then.

>  mime-text
> 
> being the fallback if type:subtype isn't found. (That's why
> the mime- prefix is nice. 'text' has too much possibility
> of collision)

(mime/text.png?) What can it collide with? There shouldn't be anything
except MIME icons in the directory, surely?

> But we really need to have some agreement from KDE before adding 
> that to the icon theme spec. The current ways GNOME and KDE handle it
> are:
> 
>  GNOME: gnome-mime-audio-x-wav, gnome-mime-audio
>  KDE: Icon name is specified in the .desktop file along with other
>       information about the mime type
> 
> There is one issue with the fallback system that I was discussing
> with Alex recently that might require further changes to the icon
> theme spec ... the issue is that say the default theme includes
> icons for a dozen different audio/ subtypes. 

>  WeakAlias=mime-audio

What about just not including multiple audio/* types in the default theme?
The default theme is supposed to be really minimal, and having all your
audio files look alike isn't a disaster.

Another possibility would be to introduce catagories for MIME types (eg,
spreadsheet, wordprocessor, musical score, etc). Some of the MIME
groupings (particularly application/*) are really bad for icons.

GNOME's 'File Types and Programs' config tool seems to have this all set
up already. Should this be added to the MIME spec?


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk		tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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