Re: icon naming spec and gnome-vfs

[Pat Suwalski <pat suwalski net>]

Long eMail, real issues at bottom...

Rodney Dawes wrote:
> You haven't lost any information, you only think you have. You're
> looking for the information in the wrong place.

The advantage of the little tag was that the information was always in 
the same place. The extension on a file moves around depending on the 
length of the filename. It was easier to scan and look for the little 
red tag or the little purple tag.

Regarding mime types, the reason I use Nautilus is because it has a 
kick-ass implementation for distinguishing between the types in a sane 
way. The extension means *nothing* to me. I often have files mailed to 
me with the wrong extension. Nautilus picks up on this. I don't know how 
many files I've been able to pick up as incorrectly named just because 
Nautilus stuck the correct icon on an incorrectly named file.

Regarding your other mail about people not appreciating your work: don't 
make assumptions like that. You know as well as everyone else that 
criticism will always outweigh positive feedback because there is more 
incentive to make it.

It is good to have a unified icon naming spec. I just don't want to lose 
what we had before. In terms of users, I'm willing to bet 2-beer when 
I'm in Boston in October that if there were a poll done for users, 
worded like this:

	"Would you be interested in having the little tag on the image
	icons that tells you what they are removed?"

You would get an 80:20 split saying No.

Now, looking back at the idea of a dynamic overlay along the lines of 
Nautilus emblems: what would be a cool way to make icons on the fly like 
that. The only thought that comes to mind is something in GTK's icon 
loader itself. When asked for, say, image/png, it would load the icon it 
does now, load an appropriate overlay, and composite them together.

Real questions:
 - would this fit into the caching concept at all?
 - maybe this could all be pre-rendered by gnome-icon-cache?
 - does this have anything that seriously impedes the icon naming spec?

I'm not seeking a bandaid solution that would revert the old behaviour, 
even if that's all I want as a user. I'm looking for ways to make it 
better. I've heard many times about developers who could use this 
overlay functionality if implemented in GNOME.

--Pat