Re: icon naming spec and gnome-vfs

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 18:06 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> I will however, disagree that we need to provide such explicit
> icons as to state what method a hard disk is connect to the computer
> through, or what type of data is contained on an optical disc, in a
> base
> GNOME install. 

This is what we used to have and it's not much different from how e.g.
Mac OS X works. I can't speak for our users (apart from many personal
mails thanking me for implementing that feature) but I think they found
this feature both usable and that it added some needed polish to the
desktop. Certainly, the GNOME VFS maintainers took the patch.

I really appreciate your work on the icon naming spec, it's a thankless
piece of work especially considering you have to deal with people like
me. I think one very nice thing about the icon-naming-spec is the
ability for a theme designer to choose what icons he wants to provide.
So, e.g. if you really want a dumbed down theme [1] like we got now in
gnome-icon-theme CVS, simply don't provide e.g. media-harddisk-usb - the
code will (when it's written) fall back to media-harddisk. 

But I just think you're way ahead of the game - you have the audacity to
force the users of our next release to live with a dumbed down theme.
That's my complaint. And, apart from solving the general problem (making
gnome-vfs use names from a future version of the icon-naming-spec) it's
something I'd like to see fixed for this release.

> No, the point of the symlinks is for compatibility. They are meant to go
> away at some point, and have the implementations be smart about falling
> back to more generic icons. The symlinks are entirely an interim
> workaround to enable smoother migration to the spec, rather than just
> outright breaking all of the icons on the desktop.

Well, currently these symlinks do break some of the user experience but
you replied to that in another mail.

> > So, is it possible to update the spec to meet the current and future
> > needs of GNOME VFS? Or at least point me to a document where this is
> > already defined.
> 
> This is defined in the spec. GNOME VFS is not the driving force behind
> the specification, nor should it be. 

Of course not.

> The driving forces are usability
> and cross-desktop support. You should read the guidelines in the spec
> for naming icons, and perhaps work on implementing fallbacks to more
> generic icons.

Well, there are two different issues here: 

 1. Currently the spec is not suitable for GNOME VFS so we need work
    on the spec. I've submitted a patch but it sounds like you want
    everyone to bless it and that's fair enough; I'll raise this
    in the appropriate forums and try to do my part - and FWIW, the
    other desktops are using the same base technology as GNOME for
    this and I do talk to the people who do the same thing for e.g.
    KDE.

    So we're not going to switch GNOME VFS before this is resolved
    and that's fine - we'll just continue using the old icon names
    and gnome-icon-theme will continue to provide symlinks.

    Is this reasonable?

 2. gnome-icon-theme suddenly has a lot fewer icons, specifically
    a lot of the icons gnome-vfs uses have been deleted from the icon
    theme:

     http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-icon-theme/24x24/devices/Makefile.am?r1=1.6&r2=1.7

    and this is in part what I think is dangerous. You didn't _have
    to_ delete e.g. gnome-dev-media-cf, you _could have_ introduced
    a similar name in the spec - hell, in fact you could have written
    the spec so it included what we needed (similar to the patch I
    sent) before you went off and broke the user experience [2]. Or
    you could have left the icons we still need in the spec in CVS
    instead of symlinking them a generic icon.

    So can we work on making gnome-icon-theme provide at least some
    of the most important icons you deleted? To me that is

     gnome-dev-media-cf
     gnome-dev-media-ms
     gnome-dev-media-sdmmc
     gnome-dev-media-sm
     gnome-dev-harddisk-usb
     gnome-dev-harddisk-1394
     gnome-dev-removable-usb
     gnome-dev-removable-1394
     gnome-dev-disc-dvdrom

    Since you want the spec to be blessed (which I agree is a good
    idea) you probably just want to add these to gnome-icon-theme CVS
    for the time being and drop the symlinks in icon-naming-utils. 

    David

[1] : apologies for using such an emotionally loaded word - I really do
think the icon-naming-spec is the way of the future, I just hate to see
regressions.

[2] : Because now it's a poor user experience: instead of seeing an icon
that resembles the media the user put in he now gets something that
looks like his hard disk. Surely you don't want that, why else would the
new four flash icons appear in tango-theme-extras