Icon names vs. emblems

[Rodney Dawes]

On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 09:14 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 12:35 +0200, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > 
> > As long as providing such a [base]+[emblem] icon is always optional for the 
> > icon theme, this might work out nicely. I think the language in your patch is 
> > not optimal yet, it should emphasize that this is mainly a feature for 
> > themers to provide tuned versions instead of the standard overlay mechanism.
> 
> Sure, thats the intention. I can rework the language to make that
> clearer.

How is using a + any different from a - in this situation? Shouldn't we
provide the icon, and the emblem (in their appropriate contexts), and
the implementation then do what it needs with them? Why wouldn't the
implementation just load the icon and the emblem, and overlay them in
code? We already do this in nautilus for numerous file properties
anyway.

Perhaps now would be a good time to implement some sort of "emblem"
API in the icon theme implementation, and update the Icon Theme
spec to clarify the "Emblems" context a bit. In the GIcon/GtkIconTheme
case, it might be a good idea to add some sort of "list" of emblems
for the icon. This way the emblem could be loaded and composited
automatically in the right place.

-- Rodney