packaging: new spec filed idea

[Robin Norwood]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 07:41 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2008 7:20 AM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> > I think updating the hicolor-icon-theme package every time we add a new app to
> > Fedora, or any time such an app changes its icon, is somewhere beyond impractical.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the value of icons when searching for
> applications that you haven't already installed.  But perhaps there is
> value in using icons for updates. My reasoning is, most people should
> have icon awareness for applications they use a lot.

Well, one benefit is this use case:

o User installs $app
o User looks in the menus to try to run $app

Having the icon the user saw when he installed the app be the same as
the one in the menus would be a nice win.

IIRC, there (is/was?) an Ubuntu tool that trolled the packages
for .desktop files and used the icon from that.  I don't know the exact
details, but it must've been an offline process.  This wouldn't of
course work for packages that don't have a .desktop file, but then of
course they wouldn't appear in the menus either.

> So is there a compromise here.   Would it be worth embedding an icon
> name into repodata for a package, and if they icon exists on the
> system then the gui tools will use the icon in reference to a package
> update?  But I don't know how you would drive that information into
> the repodata  Is that something packagedb would have to do?  For
> applications not already on the system, an icon representing the comps
> group or rpm group for which the package belongs is perhaps pulled
> from the hi-color set on system and displayed instead?

I think that's about what Jakub was suggesting, actually.

> But the underlying question that I cannot answer is if there is a real
> benefit to exposing icons at all.  I'm not sure there is. And even if
> there is, I'm not sure its worth the complexity of implementing it.

I think there would be a lot of value in it, but at the same time,
implementation is non-trivial.

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching