Reclassify Icon= in .desktop files as string, not localestring

[Egmont Koblinger]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:11 PM Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net> wrote:

> What apps?

I've shown a link that lists a couple of useful cases. E.g. "signs
that are considered rude in some cultures" (note that e.g. GNOME's
foot is such an icon), icons that are preferred to be mirrored in RTL
locales (maybe the terminal's ">_" icon one day, when generic overall
RTL support becomes available there), icons that contain text (e.g.
"Aa" for a font ediotr).

The question is whether there are any current and future apps for
which this feature is desireable to keep. You've done a quick search
among Debian packages (thanks for that!), although I'm not sure if we
can jump to the conclusion that no current software uses this feature
and no future software will. I don't think so. (I am currently working
on RTL support for gnome-terminal, so showing a "_<" icon is a
possibility I'd prefer not to get rid of.)

I totally don't understand what we would gain by removing it from the
spec. We'd just lose a (hardly ever used, but theoretically useful)
feature. xgettext needs to be fixed anyway. And fixing xgettext on its
own, without touching the spec, is already just as good. What
additional gain would we get by forbidding it in the spec?


cheers,
egmont