Icon-mime type associations

[Thomas Leonard]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 04:38:53PM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 14:54 +0100, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 11:15:25AM -0700, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > > On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:38:25 +0100, Thomas Leonard
> > > <tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> > > > This is the key decision to make. (2) is simpler for packaging, since
> > > > each app just drops its icon in a unique folder, although we'd have to
> > > > have so rules so that looking up the icon always got the same icon for
> > > > any particular set up (eg, sort the hicolor/* directories
> > > > alphabetically).
> > > 
> > > Actually, this isn't necessarily true.  It's possible to get package
> > > conflicts based on two packages trying to install the same file.
> > 
> > No, because they'd install to sub-directories named after the package
> > providing them (hicolor/gimp/mime-image:png.png vs
> > hicolor/eog/mime-image:png.png).
> > 
> > Do we have this problem with other systems which require installing files
> > into hicolor?
> 
> This is problematic, because you have to then get the new subdirectories
> into the index.theme file. And the icon names will conflict in the theme
> anyway, because the subdir doesn't affect the way icon theme lookup is
> done.

Well, we want them to conflict, in the sense that we want one icon to be
used and the other to be ignored. But, we don't want packaging conflicts
where they both try to install different files in the same place.

> Furthermore, adding lots of new directories to a theme would further
> slow down the already terrible startup cost of icon themeing since it
> means we have to look in even more directories, which are on different
> cylinder groups, and thus causing major seek times.

Yes, I see the problem. I was wondering if we'd solved it already, since
installing shared icons is a wider problem than just MIME icons. Didn't we
have something similar with emblems a while back?


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