[Goodies-dev] xfce goodies icon naming standard

[Florian Rivoal]

On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:32:53 +0900, Simon Steinbeiß  
<simon.steinbeiss at elfenbeinturm.at> wrote:

> Hi everyone,

Hi,

> I create (or: modify, I guess that's closer to the truth) icon themes  
> for xfce a lot recently, I fixed the elementary theme to work better  
> with Xubuntu and now I'm working on yet another theme.
> What I noticed during that process is that there doesn't seem to be any  
> kind of naming-convention for the icons of xfce-goodies (I'm mainly  
> referring to the panel-plugins here). Some of the goodies are using  
> generic gtk-icons that have nothing to do with the function of the  
> respective goody (smartbookmark: gtk-preferences) and others use icons  
> that are either strange (CPUFreq: xfce-unknown) or neither standard nor  
> xfce-specific (xfce4-timer: clock). These are just representational  
> examples, anyone who ever tried to theme the dialog that adds  
> panel-plugins to the panel (<=4.6.2) with fitting icons (or  
> alternatively: looked at the goodies .desktop files for reference) knows  
> how widespread this problem is. Even amongst those goodies that use  
> seemingly useful names - e.g. with a leading "xfce" - are not adhering  
> to any standard i can/could figure out, some are just as well using a  
> leading "xfce4".[1]

This proposal makes sense to me, and I'll gladly adjust the plugins I  
maintain to follow this.

You are more focused on icons that I am, so feel free to report bugs about  
weirdly named icons in any of the plugins I maintain, and I'll fix it.

That said, as I don't play all that much with icons my self, I am not sure  
I have a good grasp on the consequences. For sure, renaming xfce-unknown  
to xfce4-cpufreq can't hurt, but for the goodies that reuse standard icon  
names, isn't this helping make sure that many icon theme will have an icon  
for it? Don't we lose that by switching to an xfce only icon name?

> As a final note on the matter let me propose two possible standards:
> 1) "xfce-" + goody-name
> 2) "xfce4-" + goody-name

Either sound acceptable to me. In isolation, I'd tend to prefer the first  
one, but there are already a whole lot of things called xfce4-something,  
that the second one may be a better choice, for the sake of consistency.

  - Florian