libgnomeui and icon theme: BUG or ENHANCEMENT?

[Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it>]

GTK+ >= 2.4 lets you to manage its stock icons as a (freedesktop) icon
theme. This is great, because:

     1. you don't need to edit gtkrc ans so
     2. you can make "orthogonal" the Control and the Icon option in
        Theme capplet. [1]

libgnomeui provides additional stock icons. libgnomeui >= 2.6 depends on
GTK+ 2.4. So if A+B=C, then libgnomeui's stock icons should be managed
as an icon theme. This could be helpful, for example, to add 16x16
version of those icons[2], simply. Plus, of course, previous point 1 &
2.

Unfortunately it seems that A+B<>C. I made a test theme and a glade file
to verify it. I'll send them.

The question now is if I should open a bug asking for fix it and let
libgnomeui pick up images from icon themes, or deprecate all libgnomeui
stock icons in GNOME 2.10 and let that gnome-icon-theme provides them.

IMHO the second one is better because

     1. it remove stuff from libgnomeui (and we want remove it entirely)
     2. gnome-icon-theme provide a gazillion of icons  (for example the
        ratio about icons for table is 2:49)
     3. icon theme is better :-)

Of course there is at least one issue: you can't, by now, specify an
icon from icon theme directly in GLADE, but you need to invoke
gtk_icon_theme*() in you code. This is not so good to build up
interfaces (and mockups ;-) in a simple way.


Comments, ideas, flames ?


[1] Yes, this means that change all icons on screen don't depend on
change the appearance of buttons, tabs, sliders... By now
gnome-icon-theme and gnome-themes don't "support" this useful feature,
but I'll open relevant bugs.

[2] Note that those icons are available in gnome-icon-theme/*/stock/