Removal of icons in buttons/menus

[Olivier Brunel <jjk jjacky com>]

Hi,

I'd like to address the issue of recent changes in GTK 3.10,
specifically the "deprecation" of options gtk-button-images &
gtk-menu-images, also discussed in this bug report[1].

I think there are 2 things here:

- First off, I believe removing those options is a wrong choice. If
GNOME devs want to get rid of icons in menus/buttons on GNOME that's
fine I guess, I certainly don't care as I don't use GNOME, but forcing
it to devs & users of GTK applications (GNOME or not), isn't right.
GTK isn't a private/internal component of GNOME, it's a public toolkit
used by plenty of applications, and users, outside of GNOME.

So I'd like for this to be reconsidered. But even outside of this,


- Secondly, this "deprecation" wasn't handled correctly, IMHO. I've
always put deprecation in quotes so far, because it doesn't feel like
one, it feels more like a removal. And removal is bad, as it breaks
things (user experience mostly, here).

When functions are deprecated, they still exist and continue to work as
before. The deprecation is only an indication that one shouldn't use
this anymore (in newly written code), as you're aiming towards removal.
_Aiming towards_, as in it currently keeps working just as before, so
nothing breaks.

With the so-called deprecation of those 2 options, things broke. Because
they don't continue to work as before, they're simply ignored; This is
wrong.

Making matter worse, this didn't only remove the possibility for users
to disable/remove icons in buttons and/or menus, but, since default
value was TRUE, it forces them *not* to have them, as it is now enforced
to FALSE!

This pretty much _guarantees_ to break user experience. Again, this is
wrong.

So even if you decide to go through with this and *eventually* remove
those options (though I hope not), this should remain a thing of the
future. GTK 3.10.1 should IMO fix this by only having those options
deprecated, as in they still exists and work as before, only it's
recommended not to use them anymore as the *goal* is to eventually get
rid of them.


As a side note, I believe there's a documentation bug as well, since
said documentation[2] doesn't even mention the fact that those options
are deprecated/ignored (only a change of new default value to FALSE).

(Unless the documentation is right, and those options should never have
been ignored in the first place, only deprecated and have their default
values changed?)


Thanks,
-jjacky

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708674
[2]
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.10/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-menu-images