Icon naming spec: generic binary MIME type icon?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sunday 07 December 2008, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-12-06 at 01:05 +0100, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > Yes, of course. I'm aware that gnome-icon-theme has little relevance to
> > spec issues, and did not intend to imply any connection, just that it's
> > not currently possible to use an application-octet-stream icon while
> > assuming that it will actually be present.
>
> Well, the point of the spec is to have generic fallbacks, and so you can
> query for things which aren't necessarily going to be in an icon theme.
> We now also have generic icon names specifiable in the shared-mime-info
> data, and in the Shared MIME spec.

Yes, this is exactly what prompted me to start this thread: shared-mime-info 
apparently has chosen to use the text-x-generic generic icon at least for 
some things for which there's no better standard generic icon available in 
the icon naming spec, even if the files of the MIME type are binary files, 
not text?

For example, the generic icon for application/x-pkcs12 in shared-mime-info is 
text-x-generic which makes no sense to me.

Maybe these (now that I look into the XML, there actually is just a few of 
them) are just bugs in shared-mime-info and non-text files for which there's 
no better generic icon name available in the icon naming spec's standard mime 
type icons list should not have any generic-icon specified whatsoever?

Or alternatively, an icon for generic binary files could be added in the 
standard mime type icons list so that could be used instead of leaving out 
generic-icon altogether in shared-mime-info (or using something (IMO) clearly 
wrong such as text-x-generic for them in it, or using something like 
application-octet-stream in it which is not in the standard mime type icon 
list and thus cannot be trusted to be available)?