mime-type icons, a proposal

[Frans Englich]

On Thursday 07 October 2004 07:07, you wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 16:09 +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> > Assuming the priority is; 3rd party icons for mimetypes(hicolor) are
> > only used when there isn't a specific mimetype icon in the theme, it
> > means it will rarely happen. For example, all common specific-
> > mimetypes would be covered by the icon theme since many people
> > (probably the majority) needs them. For instance, icons for real media
> > is already in the kde/gnome icon themes.
>
> This avoids the issue that there is currently a big problem with mime
> icon theming. 

I see it as two separate issues: One is handling conflict resolution when 
multiple mimetype bindings exists; another is mapping specific mime icons 
lookups to the generic icon. AFAICT, they can be treated independently.

> You *have* to add a specific mime icon for each and every 
> mimetype, even if that is only a symlink to the generic icon for the
> type. This is lots of work that each theme author currently has to do.
> It also causes slowdowns on startup (reading many files) and wastes a
> lot of memory (duplicating the icons when caching, storing the symlinks
> in memory). And its fragile, since any addition of a new mimetype
> upstream immediately breaks the look of themes.

Yes, no doubt it's a big issue and requires a solution. No, I don't know how 
to solve it.


Cheers,

		Frans