Icon Name Standardization, second draft

[Andrew Conkling]

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 14:57 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> Aliasing really belongs in the Icon Theme and MIME Type specifications
> themselves, rather than in the Icon Naming Specification, I think. The
> aliases aren't there to say that something should be named some way.
> They should be meant to allow theme authors to create one image, and
> specify legacy names for that icon, that apps may still use, so that
> we don't have to copy icons around or create symlink farms, to make the
> desktop look proper when using the theme. I will be working on a patch
> to the Icon Theme spec, and to gtk+ as well, for implementation value,
> to do something like Provides=foo,bar for the .icon files.

I didn't realize there were two specs. ;)

> One of the purposes of this spec, is to list all the generic icon names,
> as well as many of the more specific names. However, I am not sure how
> best to distinguish the two, in the docbook source for the spec.

Generic being the designated name and specific being legacy names?  If
that, we could just add a column on that list and name it "Provides
these legacy icons" or something.  Just like you're suggesting to add
to .icon files.

> If this is happening in GNOME, then it is a regression, and you should
> file a bug report. The panel used to have code to strip the extension
> and path off of an icon's filename in the desktop files, for looking up
> in the icon theme. If no icon was found in the theme, it would fall back
> to trying to use the full path as specified in the file. I'm not sure
> what KDE does here, though.

Nope, Xfce here.  That Gnome slickness, though, seems a bit of a
workaround; I think something should be laid down in a spec to settle
the affair (when I say this in bugreports for my distro, they never know
about this) so one could refer to it for a description etc.

> I recently sent a seperate specification docbook file to xdg list, but
> it seems to be still waiting for moderator approval, as the docbook is
> slightly above 40K in size. Jakub had pointed out a couple things, so
> perhaps I will make those fixes, and send it out again, compressed, or
> on a web server somewhere.

So what can I do at the moment to help?

Cheers,
Andrew