Icon Theme Spec Patch

[Heinrich Wendel]

On Monday 15 September 2003 13:42, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.

>
> 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.

I don't know how the theme situation in gnome/kde is, are there any compatible 
things? Maybe others can comment on this better.

>
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  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 invasion. She's a cosmopolitan out-of-work mercenary who can talk to
> animals. They fight crime!

mfg, Heinrich :)