Independence of widget/GTK and icon themes

[Rodney Dawes]

On Sat, 2005-04-09 at 05:23 +0200, tackat at t-online.de wrote: 
> > *- By widget theme, I only mean GTK, as that is all with which I have
> > theming experience.  If KDE themes are already completely independent,
> > more power to the devs.
> 
> KDE does already have completely independent themes since years. 
> As soon as you realize that: 
> 
> * in KDE different iconthemes and widgetstyles are usually shared by
> different 
> Metathemes already,
> * only in very rare cases a complete Metatheme of wm-, widget- and 
> icontheme exists -- most KDE iconthemes aren't even accompanied by a
> specific other wm/widgettheme.
> * Having different Metathemes sharing the same iconset either means
> copying/symlinking the whole iconset or having weird
> cross-dependencies with possible breakage of installed metathemes if a
> branch is removed. - or having inheritances added that would probably
> not apply to certain kinds of themes.

"Weird" dependencies? No. You have inheritance. That's it. The icon
theme can be installed separately from the metatheme. We already have
these issues with metathemes anyway. So you're complaining that
something that already exists, will now exist. And, since GTK+ 2.4,
you can move the stock icons into the icon theme. So, this is a solved
problem in gtk+ as well, which is what Andrew was asking about anyway.

> .. you might find out why Rodney Dawes' proposal for the "Icon Theme
> Spec fix" wrt the /icons/$themename -> themes/$themename/icons -change
> creates a lot of "disadvantages" at the expense of breaking forward
> compatibility. As long as these issues aren't sorted out I object to
> this "fix".

This is a non-issue. No individual applications provide their own icon
theme spec implementations currently. As I said, it's the same as if you
were to add new widgets to GTK+ or QT or whatever, and a theme wanted to
support those, the theme would require the latest version of the
toolkit. Icon Themes that are moved to this new, more appropriate
location, would just mean that they require newer versions of the icon
theme specification in implementations. Old themes don't break. New
themes don't work on older implementations. You can't compile an app
against GTK+ 2.4, and use the new widgets, and expect it to work with
a GTK+ version 2.0. It's simple. I don't see what the issue is really.

-- dobey