Icons for mimetypes

[Alexander Larsson]

On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 11:34, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 09:16:49AM +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 18:43, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> > > On Friday 24 October 2003 10:06, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> [...]
> > > > What gnome currently does is:
> > > >
> > > > mimetype "application/x-foo" first tries "gnome-mime-application-x-foo",
> > > > and if that doesn't exist it falls back to "gnome-mime-application".
> > > >
> > > > This seems to work pretty well, although there are issues. For instance,
> > > > if a base theme adds a specific mimetype icon that is not in a derived
> > > > theme, the derived theme will start using the specific icon from the
> > > > differently looking theme instead of the generic one from the derived
> > > > theme.
> > > >
> > > Matching a specific document-type to just an unknown application-data
> > > type is not very specific. That is why I suggested using a more
> > > fine-grained content tree for selecting icons. So that specific
> > > document-types would fall back to a generic document-type, and so on.
> > 
> > Its not great, but it works for e.g. images and audio. A tree has other
> > issues such as someone needs to define a tree we can agree on, maintain
> > it and make sure everyone uses the same tree. It also has the same
> > inheritance issues that the gnome method has.
> 
> How does gnome-control-center generate its tree? I see we have, eg:
> 
> -> Documents
>    -> Diagram
>       -> Dia diagram

I dunno. I'm afraid to look at that code. I might go blind.

> Also, we need some icons in the base theme. Eg, an application should be
> able to get an icon for 'mime-inode:directory' or 'mime-text' whatever
> theme is selected.

All shared base icons should go in the hicolor theme. Nothing else is
guaranteed to get picked up by all implementations. However, I'm not
sure we need this there. Any usable theme is gonna have these, and all
apps that use icon themes are gonna need more icons than that anyway.

> How does this interact with applications installing icons directly to
> hicolor?

Not at all?

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a world-famous Republican card sharp fleeing from a secret government 
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