Icon theme spec & inheritance

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:27:57 +0200 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:

>On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 12:15:11PM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
>> On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 17:35 +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
>> > - private application icons
>> >   - to be able to theme the app's private icons, the app needs to
>> > look for icons from the configured theme(s) in some standard
>> > locations, like share/icons/<theme>/apps/<app> or whatever - some
>> > ideas were brought up in the discussion a year ago.
>> 
>> My recollection is that developers should not install these
>> anywhere under share/themes.  The recommended place for them
>> is under share/<app>/icons/<theme>.  Since these icons only
>> ever need to be loaded inside your application, it's sufficient
>> to add this directory to the icon search path within your code.
>> 
>this is a nightmare for assembling and installing those themes ...

No, it's not; this is easy, and is exactly how it should be done.  The
default private icons for an app go in
$prefix/share/<app>/icons/hicolor/.  The app then appends
$prefix/share/<app>/icons to the theming search path.  If 'real' icon
themes want to theme these private icons, they'll live with the theme,
e.g. in /usr/share/icons/<themename>/.  Looking up the private icon
name will first return a proper themed icon, and if none exists, fall
back to the default icons installed by the app in the private location.

There's a tutorial out there somewhere that explains this better, but I
can't seem to find it right now.

	-brian