XDG Icon Spec: requesting new icons for headsets, speakers, headphones

[Marius Vollmer]

ext Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net> wrote:
>> If you have better names, Rodney, feel free to mention them, and add
>> those to the spec. Otherwise, you're just stalling for time, and making
>> the spec more irrelevant each day.
>
> I'm not sure it makes sense to 'fork' a spec, as this sort of negates
> the point of a single specification.

True, but what might work is to have a second "Extra Icons" spec that
works together with the base icon spec.

This "Extra Icon" spec would, by design, have the same goals as the base
spec, but would be maintained in a more 'reasonable' way.  I.e., it
wouldn't be a ever-growing set of ill-conceived icons, but it would also
not be a fortress of resistance.

By making it an addition to the existing spec instead of a fork of it,
it becomes clear that the Extra Icon spec will never conflict with the
existing spec and implementers are not faced with a either/or choice
between the two.  They are just faced with the "do we also do Extras?"
choice.  This is less controversial and easy to communicate.

The hope would be, of course, that the Extra Icons are so delicious that
everybody wants them, and that it will become clear quite soon that they
(or most of them) really should be in the base spec.  Or it might become
clear that the base spec is stagnant and dead anyway, that all the
action is in the Extra Icons spec, and that the maintainers of the Extra
Icons should take over the base icons as well and let the base spec die
in peace.


(One way in which this might bomb is that the maintainer of the base
spec doesn't pay attention to the Extra Icons spec and makes conflicting
changes to the base spec, out of spite.  At that point, a painful
decision needs to be made between the two.  Hopefully this isn't
necessary.)