Re: objection! [was Re: Icon and pixmap location]
On Wed, Nov 03, 1999 at 02:52:41AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> I'm still undecided as to whether we should have
>
> /usr/share/icons
>
> or
>
> /usr/share/bitmaps
> as well as
> /usr/share/pixmaps
>
> OTOH, the former may well turn out to be fine. Why?
>
> * almost all image files identify their type by extension (.xbm, .xpm, .png)
> * I don't recall, but the XPM spec may be a proper superset of the XBM spec
> (I know this is true functionally, but not if it is true syntactically)
> * XFree86 4.0 will include an xpm library. The days of a monochrome-only
> image file format "officially" supported by the X Window System are fast
> drawing to a close.
>
> I'm not averse to giving /usr/share/icons a shot and then seeing what
> breaks.
>
> BTW, to rebut the argument about a 1024x768 .xpm, I rebut that
> /usr/share/icons is actually a superior solution in that case --
>
> If you don't intend for it to be used as an icon, don't put it there.
> Meanwhile, /usr/{something}/pixmaps could reasonably be interpreted as a
> respository for all sorts of .xpm's, regardless of their purpose.
A thought on this last point:
I would be happy to see /usr/share/{bitmap,pixmap} -> /usr/share/icons
symlinks. In this way, things can be deposited in the most
"appropriate" location, but users and programs will always know where
to find the files: they will always be in /usr/share/icons and they
will also always be in /usr/share/pixmaps.
I'm also undecided as to what to do with the /usr/X11R6 directories.
I would be happy to leave them alone, but also happy to see them
become symlinks to /usr/share/icons instead.
Technical question: if xfree86-common were to move all of the icons
currently in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/{pixmaps,bitmaps} into
/usr/share/icons and then set up symlinks, how badly would things
break wrt dpkg? I'm certainly not advocating that we do anything
before the potato release, though. Too much to go wrong.
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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