On May 25, 2009, at 6:57 AM, Ted Gould wrote:
On Sun, 2009-05-24 at 05:12 -0700, MenTaLguY wrote:
Aside from my personal opinion that icons.svg should not be removed
Just for the record, as I think that it doesn't get said enough, I'm -1 on keeping icons.svg. The critical failure that icons.svg brings is that there is no way for us to share icons with The GIMP. There is NO REASON we should have a different "Layer Up" icon than The GIMP and it is part of what makes the Free Software Graphics suite feel fragmented.
I realize that this mail won't solve the problem, but I think that it's important to realize that icons.svg does cause some problems for us.
Sharing icons with the GIMP would be a good thing... however...
1) They use a lot of their own custom work (code-wise, etc)
2) They are generally not wanting to bother sharing icons.
The latter is probably the bigger problem. As I've tried to push, shared icons need at least some coordination of names. That probably is the top thing blocking apps sharing icons. When the people were trying to coordinate the Art Libre naming set for creative icons, repeated attempts were made to get their feedback, but to no avail.
Now... since GIMP is not using stock mechanisms, we can't even get at their icons reliably if we wanted. So the user visible goal would be to display consistent icons with them... but to implement it we would have to have our own copies of the same image shapes but in different sizes, etc. Therefore in regards to this goal, the use of icons.svg is not blocking anything.
I do agree that it would be nice for apps to have unified icons; that was the whole goal of the Art Libre naming set. However, we've not been able to coordinate even names with the other main projects. (Blender, on the other hand, was interested but do their icons in a completely different manner where they have one large bitmap that they chop sprites from at runtime)
So again, icons.svg does not really cause that problem that is bothering you and me both.