Independence of widget/GTK and icon themes

[Andrew Conkling]

On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 12:12 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 07:13 -0400, Andrew Conkling wrote:
> > With all the recent talk of icon theme specs on the xdg-list, here's an
> > idea I posted on the gtk-list with no replies:
> > 
> > One thing that would really rock my socks is independence of widget* and
> > icon themes.  As of now, AFAIK, to fully take advantage of an icon theme
> > in GTK, you have to add its iconrc file to the gtkrc of the GTK theme in
> > use.  That's kind of a pain, for example, if you use a system theme
> > whose gtkrc you can't edit or if you want to change your GTK theme
> > without changing your icon theme or vice versa.  Basically, all changes
> > to the GTK theme have to happen in ~, so there's no hope of tracking a
> > theme's changes system-wide.
> 
> There has been no need for an iconrc since GTK+-2.4. 
> (So over a year now)

All well and good, but if I don't use one, certain app icons don't
theme.  As far as I can tell, the icon theme takes care of all icons
that are 'properly' themed and the iconrc takes care of some that are
named differently than the theme's files.  Is that correct?