Some Icon Theme Spec fixes

[Rodney Dawes]

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 12:24 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> I put the obvious fixes in cvs.

Great. Thanks.

> Does everyone agree with the /icons/$themename ->
> themes/$themename/icons change, and will all current implementators
> change this? 
> 
> While I see the reasons for this change it also means that old
> applications using the old spec will totally fail to load icons from
> themes using the latest specification. At the very least there is gonna
> be a transition period where some icon themes don't work in some apps.
> Is it really worth breaking apps to change this location?

It seems to me that the same issue would have occurred when adding the
XDG_DATA_* stuff to the spec, as it means new directories, for
implementatins that didn't handle the Base Directory specification at
the time. I don't think the original GnomeIconTheme implementation
handled it, for example. I think it's worth it. The breakage isn't that
bad. It means you need to create a symlink to ~/.themes/Name/icons/ as
~/.icons/Name. You would have to do similarly if you were still using an
old version of gnome that doesn't handle the XDG_DATA_* variables. This
change seems very worth it to me, to allow theme authors to provide one
single tarball for an entire desktop theme, in the future.

> The example icon name change is a bit unfortunate, as you picked a
> gnome-only mimetype (the freedesktop mimetype for directories is
> "inode/directory", but gnome currently still use the old x-directory/*
> mimetypes for various types of directories).

Hrmm. Very unfortunate that the shared-mime-info stuff uses that. IANA
does not have the inode/ parent type as an assignment. Also, inode seems
specific to something that more advanced *nix users would know about,
and might seem odd for the user to be looking at it in a file properties
dialog or such. Do FAT or HFS ever refer to inodes anywhere? What does
idisk.mac.com return for the MIME types of folders? What do other DAV
servers return for MIME types of folders? Windows file sharing?
AppleShare? I think we should use something more appropriate to what is
in use by most of the world today, rather than something that is
contrived to be correct, because we decided to put it in our own MIME
type sharing specification. What did KDE use before shared-mime-info was
available? Not that I particularly care if it is x-directory/foo or not,
aside from the fact that it also affects the Icon Naming specification
stuff that I've been working on. That is easily changeable though, as is
the Shared MIME Database Specification.

-- dobey