Re: Bug#27869: PROPOSED] Icon location policy
It's been just over a week since I proposed this, and although I got
consensus from those people as maintain window managers before
proposing it, I only got one second here so far. Is my proposal
really that bad?
To recap my proposal briefly: (read the full text at the bottom of
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/27/27869.html)
The basic problem I'm trying to address is where icons should go;
there are at least two sides to this:
1) icons packages use themselves - for example, the win95-ish icons
fvwm95 comes with, or the icons xemacs20-support uses to support w3
mode.
2) icons packages provide for use by window managers - for example,
the gnu head and kitchen sink icons xemacs ships with.
Some people have brought up clip-art type packages which may contain
loads of images, which are nevertheless intended to be used by other
packages. Such packages are beyond the scope of this proposal; if
people really care about them, they can write their own proposals.
Note, for example, that this proposal does not exclude there being
other subdirectories of /usr/share/icons.
Now, the proposal basically says that icons that fall into category 1)
should be put into a package-specific directory. Seems obvious,
right? Well, policy currently says nothing, and the practice in bo
was to dump all .xpms into /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/include/pixmaps.
Category 2) icons obviously need to go into a common directory;
otherwise there's no way they would be found by window managers.
My proposal then gives explicit location names, (/usr/share/icons and
/usr/share/icons/mini), and provides guidelines for window manager
maintainers on what they should use as a path when searching for
icons. (including saying that window managers should search certain
subdirectories of /usr/local and $HOME so that the sysadmin and user
can add their own private icons).
To ease the transition, my proposal would take effect for most
packages only in the release that is one or two releases after slink,
but would take effect for window managers immediately. (Similar to
what is being considered for info and man viewers)
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