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

[Jonathan Blandford]

Thomas Leonard <tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> 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?

I completely agree.  I would like to see a move to
~/.themes/ThemeName/icons in the long run.  We should think about a
migration path, as well as convincing the icon-spec people to move this
direction.

> 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).

The way GNOME works is that it sets theme parts individually.  There is
no global metatheme setting.  It seems to work alright.

-Jonathan