Re: Question about gmc

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

>  When I see files in the gnome desktop, for example the symbolic link to
>  the partition /dev/hda1, or the direct access to the URL
>  http://www.redhat.com they show the correct icon on them.
>  However, when I use gmc to see this files - that reside in
>  $HOME/.gnome-desktop - I don't see the correct icons on them.

If you go to Settings/Preferences and turn on "Caching/Allow
customization of icons...", then you will see the appropriate icons,
but not the names you gave to the URL links.  What this option does is
it tell GMC to read the icon metadata information for files in the
directory windows; normally it is not read because it can be very slow
when your home directory is mounted over NFS.

This is a known problem/inconsistency in GMC.  It will be addressed in
the new file manager, which will be able to do lazy reading of
metadata.

>  Another "someway" proposal:
>  Is it a good idea to store resources in executable files or dlls as
>  Windows does?
>  I mean, ELF binaries or shared libraries could contain icons, cursors,
>  menu entries, etc... Gmc could try to find icons inside ELF binaries
>  (you don't have to put them in separated files), so that for example,
>  when I browse /usr/bin/gnome-linuxconf a nice icon appears.

Not all platforms on which GNOME runs use ELF.  We are using Tom
Tromey's very nice gnome-metadata system for file metadata such as
icons.

Other resources such as cursors and miscellaneous pixmaps that an
application may need are either stored as inline RGB data or as
pointers to files in the GNOME installation.  An application that
wants to let the user customize its pixmaps should of course read all
of its pixmaps from files and provide a nice GUI configurator :-)

  Federico