Application Icons vs. icon themes

[Shubham Mishra]

On 07/11/2013 05:17 AM, Len Ovens wrote:
> Mish I think I have caused some confusion with Icon themes.
>
> Here is something I explained on IRC, but realize it should be here so you
>   see it for sure:
>
> < OvenWerks> zequence: there are some problems I think with what you were
>                     discussing with Mish.
> < OvenWerks> You may recall, we wanted to use standard categories and
>                     names for things.
> < OvenWerks> so ihave styled all the icon names after the standard icon
>                     names for other standard menus.
> < OvenWerks> What this means, is that some of the icons I use (or will
>                     use when they are done) in the menu package will
>                     not show up in our menu because they are "themed over"
>                     or overriden by themes farther up the theme inheritance
>                     chain.
> < OvenWerks> That is why we are using the icon-theme to make sure our
>                     icons show up in our iso.
> < OvenWerks> zequence: there are two paths we can go with this:
> < OvenWerks> 1) use icon themes as Mish suggested, one dark and one light
>                     that inherit other dark and light themes. Mish seems to
>                     have found nice ones.
> < OvenWerks> 2) Rename our icons non-standard so they show up no matter
>                     what icon theme is used.
> < OvenWerks> I am sure Mish's confusion is my fault and I appologize.
> < OvenWerks> I should probably drop this in the mailing list :)
>
> I am not sure this clears everything up, but as you can see there is a
> problem that needs resolution one way or the other.
>


So from what I understand, the problem is this: Currently the UBS 
specific menu icons are in the hicolor folder. But because the names 
used are standard ones, they might get overridden by themes from 
~/.themes, which also have those categories. They might not have icons 
for all the menus though so some will change and some will be taken from 
hicolor, which might not look good because of inconsistency. For this I 
think non-standard names could be used, since these menus are specific 
to Ubuntu Studio only.

As for light and dark themes, I suggested that simply because it's kinda 
hard to make icons that look good in both. Right now I'm making some 
icons following Kaj's suggestion of using different colours for the 
different workflow menus. I'm not sure if it'll work out; if it does 
then we can scrap the light/dark idea, and if not then we'll see.

And no that was my fault. I couldn't realise that it was the 
"ubuntustudio-menu" package (that puts them in hicolor) that was being 
talked about. I had something else in my mind entirely, hence the confusion.

For anyone who's interested, this folder has previews of anything that 
I'm currently working on. (NOTE: There is no versioning for this folder. 
It's simple cloud storage and will most likely be deleted after all 
icons have been made and moved to my branch)

https://www.wuala.com/Mishrito/Icons/?key=CRBaTkk2DEln