Re: Removal of icons in buttons/menus

[Olivier Brunel <jjk jjacky com>]

On 10/09/13 16:45, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Hi Olivier,
>
> thanks for your feedback.
>
> You are right that the functionality of the gtk-button-images and
> gtk-menu-images settings was removed. They are only 'deprecated' insofar as
> programs that were using g_object_set to directly change these settings on
> the GtkSettings object will not fail to compile or run.

Right, but as I explained, I think this wasn't done "right." That is,
the GtkIcon* API wasn't just removed without warning, in fact it wasn't
removed (yet).

It is deprecated, to let people know it shouldn't be used anymore and
will eventually be removed, but for now, it still works, nothing's broken.

As I've said, going from (in any/all GTK app) having icons in
buttons/menus, and allowing user to disable that, to not having them
anymore and no options to change that, simply breaks things for users.

I hope you guys can see that, and will bring the options back (for a
while). Have them deprecated, as in recommending users not to use them,
developer not to rely on them, and make them default to FALSE from now
on, but don't break user experience with no other way to fix it than
requiring every single GTK app out there to be patched to adjust to this
change/breakage.


> As far as the functionality of those settings goes, we (the involved GTK+
> developers) have decided that we don't want to support this functionality,
> which makes it impossible for designers or even developers to know if there
> will be an icon at any place in the UI or not. This kind of variability
> makes it much hard to design and develop user interfaces.
>
> As for 'public toolkit', we certainly support more than just GNOME, but
> GTK+ operates like most open source projects - the people who show up and
> do the work get most say in the direction of the project.

Of course I understand you guys are the ones working on this, so you
decide. I just feel that having icons in an interface, in menus/buttons
specifically, can be quite valuable for the user, and help making
certain tasks much faster/easier.

As such, I feel having simple ways to use icons in there, is something
worth having in a toolkit. I think it's "unfortunate" to see this go,
and (felt the) needed to voice this.

-j

> Matthias