RFC: Wine Icons

[Branan Riley]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Branan Riley <branan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 5:54 AM, Joel Holdsworth
> <joel at airwebreathe.org.uk> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I notice that some of Wine's icons have been changed in recent releases.
>> In principle I think updating the icons is a great idea, but right now I
>> gotta say that icons in Wine are a real disaster.
>>
>> Take a look here: http://www.airwebreathe.org.uk/icons.png
>>
>> This is a screenshot of the shell folder select dialog. Out of those
>> icons My Documents looks the least broken - with it's wannabe 98/ME/2000
>> styling. Desktop, "/", My Computer and Trash look like they've been
>> taken from large icons which have shrunk - badly, and with a broken
>> alpha channel. And the new golden Folder icons look completely out of
>> place - they bear no resemblance to anything else, they've been scaled
>> down poorly, they don't look like Windows icons, and they don't fit in
>> with the Gnome desktop (and I can't imagine they'd look good in KDE or
>> on Mac either).
>>
>> I'd really like for Wine to start using icons from the Tango project, or
>> similar. The purpose of Tango was to create a set of icons that are
>> clear to see, and look good on Windows, Gnome, KDE, and MacOS. Surely
>> that's exactly what we want?
>>
>> Note that ReactOS is using Tango, and it seems to be working out pretty
>> well for them!
>>
>> Any comments on that?
>>
>> Best Regards
>> Joel Holdsworth
>
> The problem with hardcoding Tango is that it won't necessarily match
> the user's desktop.
>
> On Linux and FreeBSD, I'd suggest finding a way to detect the current
> icon theme (perhaps determine which desktop environment is running,
> then read the config file for that desktop?) and use the
> freedesktop.org icon names and the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable to locate
> the icons. This wouldn't work on KDE3 (which doesn't use the
> freedesktop spec). In that case I would say fall back to the hicolor
> icons.
>
> On Mac, you should use the native mac icons, but that might not work
> to do Obj-C issues (I know nothing about mac programming, so maybe
> there's a way to get native icons without Obj-C?).
>
> This way, when theming is implemented, the icons and the theme will
> both match the user's desktop environment. It's more complicated than
> just implementing Tango, but visually it makes more sense.
>
> Branan

Thinking about this a bit more, it would require a tool to generate
the .DLL with the icons we want from the freedesktop spec, in order to
maintain compatibility with Windows on how system icons are handled.
This could be done once when the prefix is created, with an option in
winecfg to re-build the icon DLL.