Calum Benson wrote: > On 13 Aug 2008, at 21:34, Mark Phalan wrote: > >> Can't a single "full" theme be delivered minus all the redundancy? If >> Nimbus doesn't have some icons then beef it up with icons from the >> others and drop the rest. > > Technically possible I would think, yes-- would need to check that all > the themes we were borrowing from had a licence that allowed us to mix- > and-match their icons with Nimbus, though. > > The main drawback would probably be the effort in creating such a > theme in the first place, and then maintaining it, especially when > either: > > * the themes we were borrowing from were updated (which wouldn't be a > strictly necessary activity, I suppose, but then our mega-Nimbus would > potentially look less polished than the current Nimbus) > > * we decide one day that it would be visually more appealing to fill > in the gaps from some other theme(s) than the ones we originally picked. > > Speaking as a maintainer of a couple of the current GNOME icon themes, > I know how much of a chore it is to make even relatively simple > changes to them; making sweeping changes is a bit like sticking > needles in your eyes. So I suspect this isn't a change we'd consider > doing lightly... but I'm not the Nimbus maintainer, so it's not for me > to say :) >
I tend to agree with this reasoning, and am not inclined to push for copy-paste engineering in themes anymore than I would anywhere else. I would ask, though, that space considerations be a part of the calculation in constructing the themes and dependency chains. Also, any thoughts about Glynn's suggestion of not shipping so many icon variants? For example, the 192x192 nimbus icons are 4+ MB all by themselves... Dave
