Some Icon Theme Spec fixes

[Matthias Clasen]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 09:54 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 11:10 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> No comments? Doesn't anyone have an opinion on whether we should break
> forwards compatibility like this? What do the implementers think? Will
> they implement this?
> 
> Its not exactly the same with XDG_DATA_*, because those are only set
> manually by the user. No icon set ships installed in an special
> directory that only the XDG_DATA env vars points to. However, with this
> change the recommended place for icons is in a location where old apps
> won't pick it up.
> 

You've nicely summarized the reasons why this change is a bad idea.
We should not do that.

Matthias