Re: objection! [was Re: Icon and pixmap location]
On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 08:12:43AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 12:14:05AM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> > Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > When they say "monochrome", they mean .xbm's. Why not just have a
> > > /usr/share/image directory in which images of any format or size can be
> > > placed? It sure would make things simpler.
> >
> > Just allow subdirectories in it, please. I have about 3 thousand .xpm and
> > .xbm files on my system ..
>
> Well, then, we immediately throw away the advantage that a single directory
> name gives us.
I side with Joey, with one important reservation.
A window manager or other program which makes use of icons/images from
/usr/share/{image,icon} should not need to do a search through
subdirectories. And we should not expect them to have a list of
numerous subdirectories to look through.
I am currently looking at packaging wm-icons, a package which will
replace most of fvwm-common. It contains 15 sets of 60 icons, each
set with identical names. They live in the structure:
14x14-general/
calculator.xpm
...
16x16-general/
calculator.xpm
...
etc.
with the idea that there will be three symlinks:
menu -> 16x16-general
mini -> 14x14-general
norm -> 48x48-general
and then the wm config files can refer to menu/calculator.xpm instead
of just calculator.xpm.
Why this system?
It means that if a user prefers the 44x52-penguins version as their
general choice, they can set up a symlink ~/.wm-icons/norm ->
/usr/share/icons/wm-icons/44x52-penguins in their home directory and
not have to touch any other configuration files. (And there's a
script which will do precisely that.)
Another question about the flat hierarchy: why do we need it? If
someone wants to use an icon which lives in the subdirectory called
penguins, they can easily specify penguins/sleep.xpm to the program
rather than just sleep.xpm. I don't think the windows manager needs
to do the searching, and it saves any questions of potential
conflicts: there is {no,minimal} searching. (I'm still in two minds
as to whether wm-icons itself should live in a subdirectory of
/usr/share/i*s or not. It would mean that windows managers would have
to add /usr/share/icons/wm-icons to the search path, which is probably
not a good thing. But it would reduce namespace pollution in
/usr/share/i*s, which is probably a good thing.)
Finally, even though /usr/share/icons is not fully descriptive of the
purpose of the directory, why would we want to change the name to a
brand new one which has (AFAIK) *never* been used? But if opinion is
strongly pro-/usr/share/images, I'll be happy with that.
Julian
--
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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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