mime icons for panel

[edscott wilson garcia]

On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 08:56, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> 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.

I started looking through the code very quickly (can't help myself).
>From what I gather after a very brief glance is that the idea is
basically the same, but you include some concepts not in the mime-icons
module, like the the gtkrc stuff. When I get some more free time I will
try to understand the mechanics and try to fit the ideas into the
mime-icons modules. 

> 
> 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.

Actually xffm-mime xml includes point 3. There is another module called 
"mime" (in the modules-export directory), which also uses the
freedesktop database and rules to determine mime type from file name or
magic characteristics. The mime type obtained from this module can be
fed to mime-icons module to retrieve an icon: scalable to different
sizes. The freedesktop mime types are also extended with private xfce
types to include the panel and xffm specific icons. I have no idea how
the gtk 2.4 support will work, but we do need mime icons way before xfce
makes gtk-2.4 a requirement.

BTW, the mime module also retrieves applications associated to each
mime-type, but that is scheduled to be sectioned into a different module
(hey, mime-icons was originally within the mime module too ;-) IMO,
mime-applications is just as important or even more so than mime-icons. 

> 
> 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.
> 

AFAIK, that's what the mime-icons module is all about. There might be
some minor differences at the moment with regard to the freedesktop, but
that should be easy to adjust. After all, the mime-icons module is not
yet "released" code ;-)


> > 
> 
> 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.

I think this is what I see in your icon generating code, and which could
be incorporated into the mime-icons module. If I had more time and drank
less beer I'd already have it done by now ;-)

> 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
> ;-)

I like the loadable module approach. It cuts time on compilation and
speeds up development. It also allows you to keep a tidy ship. Like C++
without the overhead. Anyways, you can always blame Benny for pointing
out the gmodule stuff. It's already used by xfrun4 with the combo
module. :-)