Multiple DeskTops, HiColor theme, standardized icon names

[James Richard Tyrer]

nf2 wrote:
> James Richard Tyrer wrote:
>> Getting back to this actual question:
>>
>> If different DeskTops install icons in HiColor there is going to be a 
>> problem.
>>
>> Currently, GNOME prefixes their icon names with: "gnome" and by so 
>> doing avoid this issue.  KDE naturally presume that you will only use 
>> KDE so they just have simple icon names and don't even consider the 
>> issue.
>>
>> BUT, we are going to have standardized icon names so we are going to 
>> have collisions with HiColor icons from different DeskTops.
>>
>> How do we deal with this??
> Hmm. I'm really not an expert on this, but from my understanding a 
> "theme" is a set of icons which are designed in the same style. 
> Therefore there has to be be - for instance - only a single icon for the 
> home-folder in a specific theme. There is no need for desktop prefixes 
> in icon names, like "gnome-fs-home", or "kde-fs-home", because the two 
> icons would look the same anyway.
> 
> If icons look different in style, they shouldn't be in the same theme.

I certainly agree with that! :-)  But, that is part of the problem. 
Since there is no central organization that is producing the HiColor 
theme (like Tango icons), icons from other themes are being installed in 
HiColor.

> And - of course - Gnome-VFS and KIO should use the same icon-names for  
> file-types. To me - an icon theme is nothing desktop related - it's 
> desktop session related (But different desktops can have different 
> default themes). The desktop session has to tell the name of the current 
> theme to all applications, regardless which toolkit or vfs they are using.

Since there is no standard HiColor icon set, and all DeskTops should be 
using it as a fall back theme, it is highly probable (almost certain if 
we use standardized names) that if you install more than one DeskTop on 
your system that you will be installing more than one HiColor of the 
same size, context, and name.

The issue is how we deal with this.  And, I suppose, the extent that we 
need to deal with this -- we could just ignore it and hope that it goes 
away.

-- 
JRT