GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 330061
some applications are broken by the icons move from hicolor to gnome
Last modified: 2007-11-12 03:45:31 UTC
The Ubuntu package for gdm has a patch using icons for the F10 menu: "... gtk_image_menu_item_set_image (GTK_IMAGE_MENU_ITEM (w), gtk_image_new_from_icon_name ("config-language", GTK_ICON_SIZE_MENU)); ... " The icon is broken with gnome-icon-theme 2.3.6 (GTK 2.8.11), the GDM greeter uses no theme
If GDM depends on icons from the GNOME theme, it should set the theme to GNOME, and get them from there. Icon themes installing random icons into hicolor is broken, and so gnome-icon-theme will not do it.
As said, the Ubuntu package for GDM has a patch, so that's not a GDM bug but rather "NOTGNOME" if you take it this way. You still break plenty of application which used to work with that change. An user came this afternoon on an Ubuntu chan because his evolution has half of his icons broken, which is due to the fact that it runs it out of GNOME and there is no theme set. You can still blame the users, applications, etc but the fact is that you breaks stuff working for ages for some users with that
Rodney, it is only "broken" in so far as you consider it broken. It is the place recommended in the icon theme spec for app icons. Did you lobby on xdg-list to get that changed, if it is broken ?!
The Icon Theme Spec does not clarify what icons should and should not be installed to hicolor. If other themes are to install icons to hicolor, what is the point of having other themes? We should just install all icons to hicolor then. But then, what if some other app provides an icon of the same name? They would conflict. This doesn't work. App icons are really the only thing that should be installed to hicolor.
OK, you are right that only app icons are meant to be put in hicolor. For other icons, we have to rely on a) standard names via the icon naming spec b) any icon theme to provide good coverage of the names in the naming spec c) ideally hicolor itself would provide good coverage, so that we always have a fallback but until these are implemented, moving icons from hicolor to gnome causes breakage.
The issue is that lot of applications use gnome-icon-theme icons which used to be shipped to hicolor. Moving them to gnome will break those applications for, let's say KDE users running those applications since by default their theme will not fallback to GNOME and they don't set the xsetting
Well, let's use a proper workaround then. Install an /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc that contains: gtk-fallback-icon-theme = "gnome" This will ensure that the gnome theme is looked in for these icons, without having to regress back to installing all of our icons into hicolor.
is that different to set the default fallback theme to "gnome" from GTK source? Matthias said he would not set gnome as default value...
The effect is the same, but GTK+ does not get contaminated...
I'm closing this as OBSOLETE. The proper solution is for apps to install icons into a private hicolor icon theme directory, not system theme directories. The only icon an app should install into the system hicolor theme, is its own app icon, which will show up in the menus, title bars, etc...