icon theme reorg plan

[Brian J. Tarricone]

edscott wilson garcia wrote:

>Adhering to a standard is very good, but is it the best choice? I ask
>this because the standard in my country is ---by long and far--- decided
>upon at Redmond, Wa.. I do not think that that standard is the best
>choice, so I do not follow it. 
>  
>
agreed - just because something is a standard doesn't make it a good 
standard.  personally, i happen to think that the freedesktop icon theme 
spec is a good standard.  it seems rather flexible and powerful, and, as 
a bonus, there's already an implementation of it (GtkIconTheme).

>We must consider that members of the development team have jobs,
>obligations, and not too much spare time. I'd rather dedicate time to
>making xfce code faster, smaller and more efficient than getting stars
>on my forehead for adhering to such and such norm ---which is bound to
>change eventually.
>  
>
understood.  i suppose i was being a bit overzealous in my wording such 
that the plan sounds like an all-or-nothing policy.  personally, i'm 
willing to get xfdesktop up to speed on this.  i'm familiar enough with 
xfce4-panel to make the required modifications there also (under the 
assumption that jasper may be too busy with real life stuff to want to 
take this on).  also, faster, smaller, and more efficient are indeed 
important - and are the main things xfce stands for - but that's not 
everything.  usability and integration are also important, and having 
DE-wide consistent icon theming is an important integration issue, IMO 
(and a nifty feature).

>That said ---and I hope you're still with me---, I do think it very
>important to get this icon business uniform for xfce. But maybe ---off
>the top of my head--- we can think of an improved xfce-standard which
>supersedes the freedesktop standard. Otherwise, if we are not
>contributing anything new to the progress of open software, could our
>time be better spent?
>  
>
well, that's a matter of opinion i suppose.  benny and i think that this 
is a worthwhile thing to do.  if you don't, no one's forcing you to make 
xffm follow our theming system; if you really aren't interested, there's 
nothing stopping you from continuing to use xffm's private icon theme 
settings.  that would be unfortunate, however, as i feel this detracts 
from xfce's overall look and appearance.  as usual in the OSS world, 
it's mainly about what interests you and what you want to put time into 
doing, and i think that's great.

as for coming up with a new standard...  that's really not my 
department.  i think i'm fairly good at designing software systems, but 
i don't really have any experience developing standards, and that's not 
something i'm at all interested in doing (esp. with the talented folks 
over at freedesktop churning them out).  if you, or benny, or jasper, or 
olivier, or anyone else were interested in developing a new standard 
that xfce could use, i'd certainly be interested in hearing about it and 
probably implementing it if i like it, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

at any rate, thank you for your thoughts.  i wholeheartedly agree that 
these changes do represent a significant investment of time, but i 
believe that the benefits make it worthwhile (as you might have guessed 
^_~).

    -brian