Re: Stock Items Deprecation

[Matthew Brush <mbrush codebrainz ca>]

On 13-07-02 06:41 AM, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As some of you may have noticed we have recently deprecated Stock Items in
> master.
>
> Some details on this change may be found here:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KCVPoYQBqMbDP11tHPpjW6uaEHrvLUmcDPqKAppCY8o/pub
>
> Please let us know what you think.

Hi,

I try not to pipe-up here too often, but since you asked :)

This seems like a whole lot of disruption to many existing GTK+ 
applications, the only decent GUI designer, and a highly used part of 
GTK+ in applications in the wild (that seems to work quite nice IME) for 
very little, if any, gain.

I work on several GTK+ projects who's code is *littered* with stock icon 
usage - because their so easy to use and understand, and it would suck 
having to go through all the busy work of updating[1] all their uses for 
what seems to be little/no gain. Also pointed out already in this thread 
has several problems in practice.

Also, in the linked Word file, it says "Since GTK+ 3.0 we have 
recommended against using Stock Items" and gives the reference to the 
migration checklist, where it doesn't say that at all, it just says "use 
named icons", which to me reads as "rather than using your own 
hard-coded/provided icons", not "don't use stock icons", although maybe 
I misunderstood it - it's not very detailed.

Also in the terse migration checklist page linked, it talks about 
"automatically adapt to theme changes" and "much more integrated 
experience" but - if it is comparing against stock icons and not other 
hard-coded non-stock icons as mentioned above - I've always found stock 
icons to make apps *very* consistent and they've always not only used my 
chosen icon theme but also update themselves correctly at runtime when I 
change my icon theme (and on platforms where I don't have/use icon 
themes they always seems to "just work").

Lastly, in the Word file linked, the only rational in "So what's the 
benefit?" is that "no matter what, stock icons will be deprecated" 
(paraphrasing) ... which if true, makes me wonder what is the purpose of 
this thread asking for people's opinions about the deprecation? It 
almost sounds like circular reasoning.

P.S. Sorry if I missed some huge "master plan" document and/or detailed 
rational about "stock icons are bad", I'm just going on the context 
given in this thread and linked document.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush

[1] Yes, I'm aware deprecation doesn't mean removal, but it means 
eventual removal in the next major version, and having your build give 
tons of compiler errors/warnings about deprecated uses if you enable 
deprecation checking in order to find other deprecated stuff. And even 
without that, it's just good style not to use deprecated stuff, IMO.