Suggestion for name specification for extra drive and media icons

[Rodney Dawes]

On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 17:52 +0100, Pierre Ossman wrote:
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> >
> > Perhaps all the media-dvd-* types should fall back to
> > media-dvd.  This would allow people to have a generic
> > DVD icon.  If a media-dvd icon isn't provided, they
> > would still end up falling back to media-cdrom.
> >
> > It would be rather silly to have a normal DVD show up
> > with a special DVD icon, but to have a DVD+R show up
> > with a normal CD icon.
> >
> >   
> 
> Definitely. The problem with recursive fallbacks is the added complexity
> to the applications that need to handle this. This would probably be
> something that should be decided early so noone does an implementation
> that wouldn't allow recursion.

I suggest you read the Icon Naming Specification again, where it
comments on the use of "-" as the word separator. The purpose of this is
to make it easy for icon theme implementations to fall back recursively
to a point, in cases where it makes sense, such as for device icons,
where you have a large hierarchy of types. This is why the iPod icons in
tango-icon-theme-extras are named the way they are.

> Related to this is how the information of fallbacks should be stored. In
> the applications as hard coded values, or on disk in some form of
> database. What do the people who write icon loading routines have to say
> about this? I guess glib and qt cover most of the icon loading on a
> modern desktop.

For MIME types, we want to use the generic fallback specification stuff
that Alex Larrson has been working on, by letting the MIME type XML
files specify the fallbacks. This allows the MIME type icons to use the
generic version in the user's theme, rather than specific versions that
may exist in themes inherited from. I don't know if we want to do a
database similar to the MIME types database, for device icons as well or
not. We can probably just specify some fallbacks through HAL, and let
the apps query it for what icon to use. HAL can then provide a list of
icons like "drive-dvd-video,drive-dvd,drive-cdrom" to look for, and the
implementation/application can fall back through the list, to the one
that exists in the current theme, before falling back to specific ones
in themes inherited from.

-- dobey