mime icons for panel

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Op vr 28-11-2003, om 14:53 schreef edscott wilson garcia:

> OK. Will do. I'm a little tied up with time now, so It might take me a
> few days to look through it...
> 

Sure, no hurry. We all are rather busy, so things move along slowly. I I
just thought you might be interested to look at a slightly different
approach.

> 
> > 
> > Where you keep track of your own theme info and have a custom mime.xml,
> > I try to make gtk take care of this: the 'theme' files are regular gtk
> > rc files defining icons for xfce stock id's. I don't know if this is
> > feasible or desirable for mime icons though. It does seem to make sense
> > for the panel.
> 
> I'm using xml in order to extend the freedesktop format for xfce. The
> file is not namespaced yet, but since it is not merged with the
> freedesktop file there is no problem here.
> 

Yeah. There are now actually three icon API's available to us for
implementing icon themes:

* custom gtk stock id's - quite feasible for the few panel icons, not
perhaps for mime icons

* xffm mime xml - this is basically a custom implementation of the gtk
stock id system, tailored more to mime icons. Can easily incorporate
panel icons as special mime type.

* mime icon themes following the freedesktop mime type database and icon
theme specifications. Uses named icons with rules to get the icon name
from the mime type. Allows for scalable or fixed size icons at different
sizes. This is what ROX is using. gtk 2.4 will have support for it as
well.

I actually don't have a good idea how much work it would be to implement
the freedesktop icon theme system. It does seem to me, that it could
benefit us a lot if we can share the work done by others.

> > 
> > Talking about icon theme support, ideally, you don't actually want the
> > user to have to change a theme in every app or utility he uses and
> > everything should just use the current icon theme. This probably doesn't
> > work well for us, since it requires theme authors to specifically put in
> > Xfce support, so perhaps we should try to follow the icon theme with our
> > own themes.
> 
> I don't quite understand what you're saying here :-0
> 

Well, this is an entirely different discussion actually. What I mean is
that if I want to switch to use a Gorilla theme I have to change the
theme in gtk, xfwm, xffm, the panel, rox, ... 

I think it would be nice if we could reduce the number of separate theme
settings, e.g. by following the gtk theme if possible.

> > 
> > And finally there is of course the icon theme spec on freedesktop.org,
> > that perhaps we should use. I haven't looked into that enough to give an
> > opinion on it. Hopefully it offers us some opportunities to take
> > advantage of work other people have done (the real advantage of using
> > standards ;-)
> 
> Yes. Although we can fill in whatever is missing with our own xfce
> specific stuff. The files I've created are not yet namespaced, but that
> should not be hard to do when and if necessary.
> 
> > 
> > Just some thoughts for future development,
> 
> The mime_module can evolve as you propose according to the needs of
> other xfce programs. It's design as a module is quite versatile because
> individual programs that use it do not have to be recompiled for any
> changes to take effect (quite different from plain dynamic loading
> libraries) although special care must be taken as you can recall from
> the bug fixed on wednesday.
> 

Well, I think icon theme support is in fact generally useful enough to
be part of the default gui library, but that's an implementation detail
;-)

	Jasper