Remove Tango-artists mailinglist from FreeDesktop.org

Jonathan Blandford jrb at redhat.com
Mon Nov 7 22:23:40 PST 2005


[ Wading into this discussion a day late against my better
judgment.. :-) ]

I'd like to add three things to this discussion.

1) Whether or not anyone likes it, the icon spec does imply a default
theme.  The spec simply specifies that "hicolor theme look neutral",
which gives no guidance as to what to really draw.  An app installing an
icon has to target some visual style -- waving our hands on this point
doesn't make it magically happen.

2) Building off that, if ISVs are going to use the icon spec at all, we
need to give them a target.  Asking them to target all known themes is
totally unreasonable; asking them to choose a style for their default
icons is also untenable.  I would totally expect them to throw their
hands up in disgust, as there's nothing valid they can do here.  The
tango project, at least, seems to be trying to solve this (very hard)
problem.

If we (the various desktop projects) insist that icon theming is a good
thing to do, then we need to answer this.  If we can't come to a default
style, or limit the extent of icon names, we should probably decide that
icon theming was a bad idea for 3rd party app writers and leave it to
desktops only.

3) Least importantly, the GNOME project hasn't agreed to switch to it
either.  It hasn't been proposed on any GNOME mailing lists, and I
seriously doubt that we'd switch to it by default, unless a really
compelling case was made.

Additionally, kudos to the tango people for tackling the naming problem.
I hope everyone agrees that this is important.  Reading through the
previous mails, it seems that there's consensus there -- it's a pity
they didn't get their messages straight.

Thanks,
-Jonathan
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