Icon Theme Spec Patch

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 12:49, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> On Monday 15 September 2003 09:40, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 14:43, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > While implementing the icon-theme-spec I found a few things that should
> > > be corrected in the current version:
> > >
> > > 1.) Convert it to the basedir spec (this is only incompatible to
> > > $HOME/.icons, which now is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/icons)
> >
> > Thus instantly changing semantics and breaking all implementations out
> > there and losing all icons pepople currently have in ~/.icons. This
> > isn't some abstract idea of a standard. Its in use in the real world,
> > and we can't just change it without consideration of that.
> 
> Yes it will break, but it is a really small break, only few people use the 
> ~./icons directory and implementations may choose to support the old dir for 
> backwards compatibility.

How is this a small break? Everyones user-installed icon themes will
stop working, with no clue why this happened. Thats a pretty bad
breakage since these have been around for quite some time. For instance
the gnome control center installs icon themes there for the user.

Also, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME sounds totally wrong for this. A bunch of icons
can hardly be considered configuration files.

If we do anything like this we should *add* $XDG_DATA_HOME/icons to the
list of directories and note that while implementations should read
~/.icons, $XDG_DATA_HOME is the prefered place, where new files should
be written. We must consider deployed standards as stable, just like we
do our APIs. We can't just remove things from them.

And while we're changing this we should discuss the position of the
icons directory in relation to other themes. Some people have proposed
changing the location from ~/.icons/Themename/ to
~/.themes/Themename/icons. I dunno what the general opinion on this is.
It is a larger change of the spec, requiring code changes bigger than
just adding a new directory, but some like the way it stuctures the
theme directory, allowing theme-balls that just untar in the themes dir.

Of course, if we change this to $XDG_DATA_HOME/themes all the other
places using .themes have to be XDG enabled to.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a hate-fuelled chivalrous jungle king who knows the secret of the alien 
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