Associating mime types with icons - broken?

[Rodney Dawes]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 19:18 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've spent the last few hours trying to figure out how you can add an icon
> for a MIME type for some 3rd party software. Unfortunately there are a few
> problems:
> 
> - Firstly the icon theme spec is extremely vague about this, it doesn't
>   mention mime types explicitly anywhere, nor does it mention how
>   a mimetype like application/x-foo is translated to an icon theme name

The Icon Theme spec was written based on the idea of sharing application
icons between desktops, not the whole slew of icons on the desktop. It
doesn't explain a lot of things as well as it should. I have been
working on some fixes to it, that I will be sending patches for soon, as
well as working to clean up the large list of standard icon names I came
up with a while back, to iron out into a spec. There should be a
concrete proposal sent out soon.

> - Secondly GNOME apparently refuses to use any icon that doesn't start
>   with gnome-mime- so that is what I have to call my icon. I haven't
>   tested this in KDE. 

The code to look up MIME icons in gnome-vfs (I think it's there anyway),
is written to translate the mime type names into these names. 

> - Thirdly adding a new icon seems to require doing a "killall nautilus"
>   to have it detected. I tried touching /usr/share/icons which is what I
>   guessed the spec meant by "top level directory" but no cigar.

This is perhaps a bug in GTK+. If you run gtk-update-icon-cache after
adding a new icon, does it get updated properly?

> Can anybody help me? The spec certainly needs clarifying on the matter,
> but before I can write a patch I need to know what the intended behaviour
> is!

What we need is a standard Icon Naming Spec, which extends across the
entire desktop. There is work being done on this, and the proposal
should be sent soon, as I said earlier.

-- dobey